In a sentence, I'd say apsw is "the SQLite lover's SQLite library". The python stdlib one tries to provide a generic interface ("DBAPI") which is great if you want to be able to swap to a different database engine later, but it's bad for actually getting the most out of SQLite.

• overflowy

  today at 7:58 PM

  Why do you say it's bad?

  • Retr0id

    today at 8:26 PM

    Everything to do with transactions, including nested transactions.

For anyone interested in an ergonomic API over this-- I ported sqlite-utils to apsw a while back: https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/apswutils

I've been using it a lot over the last year or two and it's worked great.

This library is great, and recently saved a project of mine. Figuring out what was going on with some of python's sqlite3 quirks was too much of a hassle, meanwhile this more or less just worked the way I expected it to. Because of this experience I started defaulting to it over sqlite3 for other projects as well.

(This documentation page explains the library's intent: https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/pysqlite.html)

• biorach

  today at 6:39 PM

  what quirks did you bump into with sqlite3?

I was experimenting with APSW and I noticed that when a query doesn't return any row, it becomes difficult to get column names from the cursor, is there any recommended way to do this ?

Thank you HackerNews. I learned something new and will be using APSW for my next Sqlite project.

It’s a great wrapper, but we should add a year. Not exactly new.

• Retr0id

  today at 6:24 PM

  The latest commit was 1 hour ago

  • scosman

    today at 7:16 PM

    ahh. It’s been around a while, but maybe the date convention is for articles not repos.

  • arcanemachiner

    today at 6:52 PM

    Abandonware!

• gjvc

  today at 8:38 PM

  new to many people, just not you.