Release: 1.1.0b1 | Release Date: not released

SQLAlchemy 1.1 Documentation

Microsoft SQL Server

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database.

DBAPI Support

The following dialect/DBAPI options are available. Please refer to individual DBAPI sections for connect information.

Auto Increment Behavior

SQL Server provides so-called “auto incrementing” behavior using the IDENTITY construct, which can be placed on an integer primary key. SQLAlchemy considers IDENTITY within its default “autoincrement” behavior, described at Column.autoincrement; this means that by default, the first integer primary key column in a Table will be considered to be the identity column and will generate DDL as such:

from sqlalchemy import Table, MetaData, Column, Integer

m = MetaData()
t = Table('t', m,
        Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
        Column('x', Integer))
m.create_all(engine)

The above example will generate DDL as:

CREATE TABLE t (
    id INTEGER NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1),
    x INTEGER NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
)

For the case where this default generation of IDENTITY is not desired, specify autoincrement=False on all integer primary key columns:

m = MetaData()
t = Table('t', m,
        Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True, autoincrement=False),
        Column('x', Integer))
m.create_all(engine)

주석

An INSERT statement which refers to an explicit value for such a column is prohibited by SQL Server, however SQLAlchemy will detect this and modify the IDENTITY_INSERT flag accordingly at statement execution time. As this is not a high performing process, care should be taken to set the autoincrement flag appropriately for columns that will not actually require IDENTITY behavior.

Controlling “Start” and “Increment”

Specific control over the parameters of the IDENTITY value is supported using the schema.Sequence object. While this object normally represents an explicit “sequence” for supporting backends, on SQL Server it is re-purposed to specify behavior regarding the identity column, including support of the “start” and “increment” values:

from sqlalchemy import Table, Integer, Sequence, Column

Table('test', metadata,
       Column('id', Integer,
              Sequence('blah', start=100, increment=10),
              primary_key=True),
       Column('name', String(20))
     ).create(some_engine)

would yield:

CREATE TABLE test (
  id INTEGER NOT NULL IDENTITY(100,10) PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(20) NULL,
  )

Note that the start and increment values for sequences are optional and will default to 1,1.

INSERT behavior

Handling of the IDENTITY column at INSERT time involves two key techniques. The most common is being able to fetch the “last inserted value” for a given IDENTITY column, a process which SQLAlchemy performs implicitly in many cases, most importantly within the ORM.

The process for fetching this value has several variants:

  • In the vast majority of cases, RETURNING is used in conjunction with INSERT statements on SQL Server in order to get newly generated primary key values:

    INSERT INTO t (x) OUTPUT inserted.id VALUES (?)
  • When RETURNING is not available or has been disabled via implicit_returning=False, either the scope_identity() function or the @@identity variable is used; behavior varies by backend:

    • when using PyODBC, the phrase ; select scope_identity() will be appended to the end of the INSERT statement; a second result set will be fetched in order to receive the value. Given a table as:

      t = Table('t', m, Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
              Column('x', Integer),
              implicit_returning=False)

      an INSERT will look like:

      INSERT INTO t (x) VALUES (?); select scope_identity()
    • Other dialects such as pymssql will call upon SELECT scope_identity() AS lastrowid subsequent to an INSERT statement. If the flag use_scope_identity=False is passed to create_engine(), the statement SELECT @@identity AS lastrowid is used instead.

A table that contains an IDENTITY column will prohibit an INSERT statement that refers to the identity column explicitly. The SQLAlchemy dialect will detect when an INSERT construct, created using a core insert() construct (not a plain string SQL), refers to the identity column, and in this case will emit SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON prior to the insert statement proceeding, and SET IDENTITY_INSERT OFF subsequent to the execution. Given this example:

m = MetaData()
t = Table('t', m, Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
                Column('x', Integer))
m.create_all(engine)

engine.execute(t.insert(), {'id': 1, 'x':1}, {'id':2, 'x':2})

The above column will be created with IDENTITY, however the INSERT statement we emit is specifying explicit values. In the echo output we can see how SQLAlchemy handles this:

CREATE TABLE t (
    id INTEGER NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1),
    x INTEGER NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
)

COMMIT
SET IDENTITY_INSERT t ON
INSERT INTO t (id, x) VALUES (?, ?)
((1, 1), (2, 2))
SET IDENTITY_INSERT t OFF
COMMIT

This is an auxilliary use case suitable for testing and bulk insert scenarios.

Collation Support

Character collations are supported by the base string types, specified by the string argument “collation”:

from sqlalchemy import VARCHAR
Column('login', VARCHAR(32, collation='Latin1_General_CI_AS'))

When such a column is associated with a Table, the CREATE TABLE statement for this column will yield:

login VARCHAR(32) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL

버전 0.8에 추가: Character collations are now part of the base string types.

LIMIT/OFFSET Support

MSSQL has no support for the LIMIT or OFFSET keywords. LIMIT is supported directly through the TOP Transact SQL keyword:

select.limit

will yield:

SELECT TOP n

If using SQL Server 2005 or above, LIMIT with OFFSET support is available through the ROW_NUMBER OVER construct. For versions below 2005, LIMIT with OFFSET usage will fail.

Transaction Isolation Level

All SQL Server dialects support setting of transaction isolation level both via a dialect-specific parameter create_engine.isolation_level accepted by create_engine(), as well as the Connection.execution_options.isolation_level argument as passed to Connection.execution_options(). This feature works by issuing the command SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL <level> for each new connection.

To set isolation level using create_engine():

engine = create_engine(
    "mssql+pyodbc://scott:tiger@ms_2008",
    isolation_level="REPEATABLE READ"
)

To set using per-connection execution options:

connection = engine.connect()
connection = connection.execution_options(
    isolation_level="READ COMMITTED"
)

Valid values for isolation_level include:

  • READ COMMITTED
  • READ UNCOMMITTED
  • REPEATABLE READ
  • SERIALIZABLE
  • SNAPSHOT - specific to SQL Server

버전 1.1에 추가: support for isolation level setting on Microsoft SQL Server.

Nullability

MSSQL has support for three levels of column nullability. The default nullability allows nulls and is explicit in the CREATE TABLE construct:

name VARCHAR(20) NULL

If nullable=None is specified then no specification is made. In other words the database’s configured default is used. This will render:

name VARCHAR(20)

If nullable is True or False then the column will be NULL or NOT NULL respectively.

Date / Time Handling

DATE and TIME are supported. Bind parameters are converted to datetime.datetime() objects as required by most MSSQL drivers, and results are processed from strings if needed. The DATE and TIME types are not available for MSSQL 2005 and previous - if a server version below 2008 is detected, DDL for these types will be issued as DATETIME.

Large Text/Binary Type Deprecation

Per SQL Server 2012/2014 Documentation, the NTEXT, TEXT and IMAGE datatypes are to be removed from SQL Server in a future release. SQLAlchemy normally relates these types to the UnicodeText, Text and LargeBinary datatypes.

In order to accommodate this change, a new flag deprecate_large_types is added to the dialect, which will be automatically set based on detection of the server version in use, if not otherwise set by the user. The behavior of this flag is as follows:

  • When this flag is True, the UnicodeText, Text and LargeBinary datatypes, when used to render DDL, will render the types NVARCHAR(max), VARCHAR(max), and VARBINARY(max), respectively. This is a new behavior as of the addition of this flag.

  • When this flag is False, the UnicodeText, Text and LargeBinary datatypes, when used to render DDL, will render the types NTEXT, TEXT, and IMAGE, respectively. This is the long-standing behavior of these types.

  • The flag begins with the value None, before a database connection is established. If the dialect is used to render DDL without the flag being set, it is interpreted the same as False.

  • On first connection, the dialect detects if SQL Server version 2012 or greater is in use; if the flag is still at None, it sets it to True or False based on whether 2012 or greater is detected.

  • The flag can be set to either True or False when the dialect is created, typically via create_engine():

    eng = create_engine("mssql+pymssql://user:pass@host/db",
                    deprecate_large_types=True)
  • Complete control over whether the “old” or “new” types are rendered is available in all SQLAlchemy versions by using the UPPERCASE type objects instead: NVARCHAR, VARCHAR, types.VARBINARY, TEXT, mssql.NTEXT, mssql.IMAGE will always remain fixed and always output exactly that type.

버전 1.0.0에 추가.

Legacy Schema Mode

Very old versions of the MSSQL dialect introduced the behavior such that a schema-qualified table would be auto-aliased when used in a SELECT statement; given a table:

account_table = Table(
    'account', metadata,
    Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
    Column('info', String(100)),
    schema="customer_schema"
)

this legacy mode of rendering would assume that “customer_schema.account” would not be accepted by all parts of the SQL statement, as illustrated below:

>>> eng = create_engine("mssql+pymssql://mydsn", legacy_schema_aliasing=True)
>>> print(account_table.select().compile(eng))
SELECT account_1.id, account_1.info
FROM customer_schema.account AS account_1

This mode of behavior is now off by default, as it appears to have served no purpose; however in the case that legacy applications rely upon it, it is available using the legacy_schema_aliasing argument to create_engine() as illustrated above.

버전 1.1으로 변경: the legacy_schema_aliasing flag introduced in version 1.0.5 to allow disabling of legacy mode for schemas now defaults to False.

Clustered Index Support

The MSSQL dialect supports clustered indexes (and primary keys) via the mssql_clustered option. This option is available to Index, UniqueConstraint. and PrimaryKeyConstraint.

To generate a clustered index:

Index("my_index", table.c.x, mssql_clustered=True)

which renders the index as CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX my_index ON table (x).

버전 0.8에 추가.

To generate a clustered primary key use:

Table('my_table', metadata,
      Column('x', ...),
      Column('y', ...),
      PrimaryKeyConstraint("x", "y", mssql_clustered=True))

which will render the table, for example, as:

CREATE TABLE my_table (x INTEGER NOT NULL, y INTEGER NOT NULL,
                       PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (x, y))

Similarly, we can generate a clustered unique constraint using:

  Table('my_table', metadata,
        Column('x', ...),
        Column('y', ...),
        PrimaryKeyConstraint("x"),
        UniqueConstraint("y", mssql_clustered=True),
        )

.. versionadded:: 0.9.2

MSSQL-Specific Index Options

In addition to clustering, the MSSQL dialect supports other special options for Index.

INCLUDE

The mssql_include option renders INCLUDE(colname) for the given string names:

Index("my_index", table.c.x, mssql_include=['y'])

would render the index as CREATE INDEX my_index ON table (x) INCLUDE (y)

버전 0.8에 추가.

Index ordering

Index ordering is available via functional expressions, such as:

Index("my_index", table.c.x.desc())

would render the index as CREATE INDEX my_index ON table (x DESC)

버전 0.8에 추가.

더 보기

Functional Indexes

Compatibility Levels

MSSQL supports the notion of setting compatibility levels at the database level. This allows, for instance, to run a database that is compatible with SQL2000 while running on a SQL2005 database server. server_version_info will always return the database server version information (in this case SQL2005) and not the compatibility level information. Because of this, if running under a backwards compatibility mode SQAlchemy may attempt to use T-SQL statements that are unable to be parsed by the database server.

Triggers

SQLAlchemy by default uses OUTPUT INSERTED to get at newly generated primary key values via IDENTITY columns or other server side defaults. MS-SQL does not allow the usage of OUTPUT INSERTED on tables that have triggers. To disable the usage of OUTPUT INSERTED on a per-table basis, specify implicit_returning=False for each Table which has triggers:

Table('mytable', metadata,
    Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
    # ...,
    implicit_returning=False
)

Declarative form:

class MyClass(Base):
    # ...
    __table_args__ = {'implicit_returning':False}

This option can also be specified engine-wide using the implicit_returning=False argument on create_engine().

Rowcount Support / ORM Versioning

The SQL Server drivers have very limited ability to return the number of rows updated from an UPDATE or DELETE statement. In particular, the pymssql driver has no support, whereas the pyodbc driver can only return this value under certain conditions.

In particular, updated rowcount is not available when OUTPUT INSERTED is used. This impacts the SQLAlchemy ORM’s versioning feature when server-side versioning schemes are used. When using pyodbc, the “implicit_returning” flag needs to be set to false for any ORM mapped class that uses a version_id column in conjunction with a server-side version generator:

class MyTable(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'mytable'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    stuff = Column(String(10))
    timestamp = Column(TIMESTAMP(), default=text('DEFAULT'))
    __mapper_args__ = {
        'version_id_col': timestamp,
        'version_id_generator': False,
    }
    __table_args__ = {
        'implicit_returning': False
    }

Without the implicit_returning flag above, the UPDATE statement will use OUTPUT inserted.timestamp and the rowcount will be returned as -1, causing the versioning logic to fail.

Enabling Snapshot Isolation

Not necessarily specific to SQLAlchemy, SQL Server has a default transaction isolation mode that locks entire tables, and causes even mildly concurrent applications to have long held locks and frequent deadlocks. Enabling snapshot isolation for the database as a whole is recommended for modern levels of concurrency support. This is accomplished via the following ALTER DATABASE commands executed at the SQL prompt:

ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON

ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON

Background on SQL Server snapshot isolation is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175095.aspx.

Known Issues

  • No support for more than one IDENTITY column per table
  • reflection of indexes does not work with versions older than SQL Server 2005

SQL Server Data Types

As with all SQLAlchemy dialects, all UPPERCASE types that are known to be valid with SQL server are importable from the top level dialect, whether they originate from sqlalchemy.types or from the local dialect:

from sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql import \
    BIGINT, BINARY, BIT, CHAR, DATE, DATETIME, DATETIME2, \
    DATETIMEOFFSET, DECIMAL, FLOAT, IMAGE, INTEGER, MONEY, \
    NCHAR, NTEXT, NUMERIC, NVARCHAR, REAL, SMALLDATETIME, \
    SMALLINT, SMALLMONEY, SQL_VARIANT, TEXT, TIME, \
    TIMESTAMP, TINYINT, UNIQUEIDENTIFIER, VARBINARY, VARCHAR

Types which are specific to SQL Server, or have SQL Server-specific construction arguments, are as follows:

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.BIT

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.CHAR(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.String

The SQL CHAR type.

__init__(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)
inherited from the __init__() method of String

Create a string-holding type.

매개 변수:
  • length – optional, a length for the column for use in DDL and CAST expressions. May be safely omitted if no CREATE TABLE will be issued. Certain databases may require a length for use in DDL, and will raise an exception when the CREATE TABLE DDL is issued if a VARCHAR with no length is included. Whether the value is interpreted as bytes or characters is database specific.
  • collation

    Optional, a column-level collation for use in DDL and CAST expressions. Renders using the COLLATE keyword supported by SQLite, MySQL, and Postgresql. E.g.:

    >>> from sqlalchemy import cast, select, String
    >>> print select([cast('some string', String(collation='utf8'))])
    SELECT CAST(:param_1 AS VARCHAR COLLATE utf8) AS anon_1

    버전 0.8에 추가: Added support for COLLATE to all string types.

  • convert_unicode

    When set to True, the String type will assume that input is to be passed as Python unicode objects, and results returned as Python unicode objects. If the DBAPI in use does not support Python unicode (which is fewer and fewer these days), SQLAlchemy will encode/decode the value, using the value of the encoding parameter passed to create_engine() as the encoding.

    When using a DBAPI that natively supports Python unicode objects, this flag generally does not need to be set. For columns that are explicitly intended to store non-ASCII data, the Unicode or UnicodeText types should be used regardless, which feature the same behavior of convert_unicode but also indicate an underlying column type that directly supports unicode, such as NVARCHAR.

    For the extremely rare case that Python unicode is to be encoded/decoded by SQLAlchemy on a backend that does natively support Python unicode, the value force can be passed here which will cause SQLAlchemy’s encode/decode services to be used unconditionally.

  • unicode_error – Optional, a method to use to handle Unicode conversion errors. Behaves like the errors keyword argument to the standard library’s string.decode() functions. This flag requires that convert_unicode is set to force - otherwise, SQLAlchemy is not guaranteed to handle the task of unicode conversion. Note that this flag adds significant performance overhead to row-fetching operations for backends that already return unicode objects natively (which most DBAPIs do). This flag should only be used as a last resort for reading strings from a column with varied or corrupted encodings.
class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.DATETIME2(precision=None, **kw)

Bases: sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.base._DateTimeBase, sqlalchemy.types.DateTime

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.DATETIMEOFFSET(precision=None, **kwargs)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.IMAGE(length=None)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.LargeBinary

__init__(length=None)
inherited from the __init__() method of LargeBinary

Construct a LargeBinary type.

매개 변수:length – optional, a length for the column for use in DDL statements, for those binary types that accept a length, such as the MySQL BLOB type.
class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.MONEY

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.NCHAR(length=None, **kwargs)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.Unicode

The SQL NCHAR type.

__init__(length=None, **kwargs)
inherited from the __init__() method of Unicode

Create a Unicode object.

Parameters are the same as that of String, with the exception that convert_unicode defaults to True.

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.NTEXT(length=None, **kwargs)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.UnicodeText

MSSQL NTEXT type, for variable-length unicode text up to 2^30 characters.

__init__(length=None, **kwargs)
inherited from the __init__() method of UnicodeText

Create a Unicode-converting Text type.

Parameters are the same as that of Text, with the exception that convert_unicode defaults to True.

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.NVARCHAR(length=None, **kwargs)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.Unicode

The SQL NVARCHAR type.

__init__(length=None, **kwargs)
inherited from the __init__() method of Unicode

Create a Unicode object.

Parameters are the same as that of String, with the exception that convert_unicode defaults to True.

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.REAL(**kw)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.REAL

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.SMALLDATETIME(timezone=False)

Bases: sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.base._DateTimeBase, sqlalchemy.types.DateTime

__init__(timezone=False)
inherited from the __init__() method of DateTime

Construct a new DateTime.

매개 변수:timezone – boolean. If True, and supported by the backend, will produce ‘TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE’. For backends that don’t support timezone aware timestamps, has no effect.
class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.SMALLMONEY

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.SQL_VARIANT

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.TEXT(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.Text

The SQL TEXT type.

__init__(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)
inherited from the __init__() method of String

Create a string-holding type.

매개 변수:
  • length – optional, a length for the column for use in DDL and CAST expressions. May be safely omitted if no CREATE TABLE will be issued. Certain databases may require a length for use in DDL, and will raise an exception when the CREATE TABLE DDL is issued if a VARCHAR with no length is included. Whether the value is interpreted as bytes or characters is database specific.
  • collation

    Optional, a column-level collation for use in DDL and CAST expressions. Renders using the COLLATE keyword supported by SQLite, MySQL, and Postgresql. E.g.:

    >>> from sqlalchemy import cast, select, String
    >>> print select([cast('some string', String(collation='utf8'))])
    SELECT CAST(:param_1 AS VARCHAR COLLATE utf8) AS anon_1

    버전 0.8에 추가: Added support for COLLATE to all string types.

  • convert_unicode

    When set to True, the String type will assume that input is to be passed as Python unicode objects, and results returned as Python unicode objects. If the DBAPI in use does not support Python unicode (which is fewer and fewer these days), SQLAlchemy will encode/decode the value, using the value of the encoding parameter passed to create_engine() as the encoding.

    When using a DBAPI that natively supports Python unicode objects, this flag generally does not need to be set. For columns that are explicitly intended to store non-ASCII data, the Unicode or UnicodeText types should be used regardless, which feature the same behavior of convert_unicode but also indicate an underlying column type that directly supports unicode, such as NVARCHAR.

    For the extremely rare case that Python unicode is to be encoded/decoded by SQLAlchemy on a backend that does natively support Python unicode, the value force can be passed here which will cause SQLAlchemy’s encode/decode services to be used unconditionally.

  • unicode_error – Optional, a method to use to handle Unicode conversion errors. Behaves like the errors keyword argument to the standard library’s string.decode() functions. This flag requires that convert_unicode is set to force - otherwise, SQLAlchemy is not guaranteed to handle the task of unicode conversion. Note that this flag adds significant performance overhead to row-fetching operations for backends that already return unicode objects natively (which most DBAPIs do). This flag should only be used as a last resort for reading strings from a column with varied or corrupted encodings.
class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.TIME(precision=None, **kwargs)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TIME

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.TINYINT

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.Integer

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.UNIQUEIDENTIFIER

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.TypeEngine

__init__
inherited from the __init__ attribute of object

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

class sqlalchemy.dialects.mssql.VARCHAR(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)

Bases: sqlalchemy.types.String

The SQL VARCHAR type.

__init__(length=None, collation=None, convert_unicode=False, unicode_error=None, _warn_on_bytestring=False)
inherited from the __init__() method of String

Create a string-holding type.

매개 변수:
  • length – optional, a length for the column for use in DDL and CAST expressions. May be safely omitted if no CREATE TABLE will be issued. Certain databases may require a length for use in DDL, and will raise an exception when the CREATE TABLE DDL is issued if a VARCHAR with no length is included. Whether the value is interpreted as bytes or characters is database specific.
  • collation

    Optional, a column-level collation for use in DDL and CAST expressions. Renders using the COLLATE keyword supported by SQLite, MySQL, and Postgresql. E.g.:

    >>> from sqlalchemy import cast, select, String
    >>> print select([cast('some string', String(collation='utf8'))])
    SELECT CAST(:param_1 AS VARCHAR COLLATE utf8) AS anon_1

    버전 0.8에 추가: Added support for COLLATE to all string types.

  • convert_unicode

    When set to True, the String type will assume that input is to be passed as Python unicode objects, and results returned as Python unicode objects. If the DBAPI in use does not support Python unicode (which is fewer and fewer these days), SQLAlchemy will encode/decode the value, using the value of the encoding parameter passed to create_engine() as the encoding.

    When using a DBAPI that natively supports Python unicode objects, this flag generally does not need to be set. For columns that are explicitly intended to store non-ASCII data, the Unicode or UnicodeText types should be used regardless, which feature the same behavior of convert_unicode but also indicate an underlying column type that directly supports unicode, such as NVARCHAR.

    For the extremely rare case that Python unicode is to be encoded/decoded by SQLAlchemy on a backend that does natively support Python unicode, the value force can be passed here which will cause SQLAlchemy’s encode/decode services to be used unconditionally.

  • unicode_error – Optional, a method to use to handle Unicode conversion errors. Behaves like the errors keyword argument to the standard library’s string.decode() functions. This flag requires that convert_unicode is set to force - otherwise, SQLAlchemy is not guaranteed to handle the task of unicode conversion. Note that this flag adds significant performance overhead to row-fetching operations for backends that already return unicode objects natively (which most DBAPIs do). This flag should only be used as a last resort for reading strings from a column with varied or corrupted encodings.

PyODBC

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database via the PyODBC driver.

DBAPI

Documentation and download information (if applicable) for PyODBC is available at: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyodbc/

Connecting

Connect String:

mssql+pyodbc://<username>:<password>@<dsnname>

Connecting to PyODBC

The URL here is to be translated to PyODBC connection strings, as detailed in ConnectionStrings.

DSN Connections

A DSN-based connection is preferred overall when using ODBC. A basic DSN-based connection looks like:

engine = create_engine("mssql+pyodbc://scott:tiger@some_dsn")

Which above, will pass the following connection string to PyODBC:

dsn=mydsn;UID=user;PWD=pass

If the username and password are omitted, the DSN form will also add the Trusted_Connection=yes directive to the ODBC string.

Hostname Connections

Hostname-based connections are not preferred, however are supported. The ODBC driver name must be explicitly specified:

engine = create_engine("mssql+pyodbc://scott:tiger@myhost:port/databasename?driver=SQL+Server+Native+Client+10.0")

버전 1.0.0으로 변경: Hostname-based PyODBC connections now require the SQL Server driver name specified explicitly. SQLAlchemy cannot choose an optimal default here as it varies based on platform and installed drivers.

Other keywords interpreted by the Pyodbc dialect to be passed to pyodbc.connect() in both the DSN and hostname cases include: odbc_autotranslate, ansi, unicode_results, autocommit.

Pass through exact Pyodbc string

A PyODBC connection string can also be sent exactly as specified in ConnectionStrings into the driver using the parameter odbc_connect. The delimeters must be URL escaped, however, as illustrated below using urllib.quote_plus:

import urllib
params = urllib.quote_plus("DRIVER={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};SERVER=dagger;DATABASE=test;UID=user;PWD=password")

engine = create_engine("mssql+pyodbc:///?odbc_connect=%s" % params)

Unicode Binds

The current state of PyODBC on a unix backend with FreeTDS and/or EasySoft is poor regarding unicode; different OS platforms and versions of UnixODBC versus IODBC versus FreeTDS/EasySoft versus PyODBC itself dramatically alter how strings are received. The PyODBC dialect attempts to use all the information it knows to determine whether or not a Python unicode literal can be passed directly to the PyODBC driver or not; while SQLAlchemy can encode these to bytestrings first, some users have reported that PyODBC mis-handles bytestrings for certain encodings and requires a Python unicode object, while the author has observed widespread cases where a Python unicode is completely misinterpreted by PyODBC, particularly when dealing with the information schema tables used in table reflection, and the value must first be encoded to a bytestring.

It is for this reason that whether or not unicode literals for bound parameters be sent to PyODBC can be controlled using the supports_unicode_binds parameter to create_engine(). When left at its default of None, the PyODBC dialect will use its best guess as to whether or not the driver deals with unicode literals well. When False, unicode literals will be encoded first, and when True unicode literals will be passed straight through. This is an interim flag that hopefully should not be needed when the unicode situation stabilizes for unix + PyODBC.

버전 0.7.7에 추가: supports_unicode_binds parameter to create_engine().

Rowcount Support

Pyodbc only has partial support for rowcount. See the notes at Rowcount Support / ORM Versioning for important notes when using ORM versioning.

mxODBC

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database via the mxODBC driver.

DBAPI

Documentation and download information (if applicable) for mxODBC is available at: http://www.egenix.com/

Connecting

Connect String:

mssql+mxodbc://<username>:<password>@<dsnname>

Execution Modes

mxODBC features two styles of statement execution, using the cursor.execute() and cursor.executedirect() methods (the second being an extension to the DBAPI specification). The former makes use of a particular API call specific to the SQL Server Native Client ODBC driver known SQLDescribeParam, while the latter does not.

mxODBC apparently only makes repeated use of a single prepared statement when SQLDescribeParam is used. The advantage to prepared statement reuse is one of performance. The disadvantage is that SQLDescribeParam has a limited set of scenarios in which bind parameters are understood, including that they cannot be placed within the argument lists of function calls, anywhere outside the FROM, or even within subqueries within the FROM clause - making the usage of bind parameters within SELECT statements impossible for all but the most simplistic statements.

For this reason, the mxODBC dialect uses the “native” mode by default only for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements, and uses the escaped string mode for all other statements.

This behavior can be controlled via execution_options() using the native_odbc_execute flag with a value of True or False, where a value of True will unconditionally use native bind parameters and a value of False will unconditionally use string-escaped parameters.

pymssql

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database via the pymssql driver.

DBAPI

Documentation and download information (if applicable) for pymssql is available at: http://pymssql.org/

Connecting

Connect String:

mssql+pymssql://<username>:<password>@<freetds_name>?charset=utf8

pymssql is a Python module that provides a Python DBAPI interface around FreeTDS. Compatible builds are available for Linux, MacOSX and Windows platforms.

zxjdbc

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database via the zxJDBC for Jython driver.

주석

Jython is not supported by current versions of SQLAlchemy. The zxjdbc dialect should be considered as experimental.

DBAPI

Drivers for this database are available at: http://jtds.sourceforge.net/

Connecting

Connect String:

mssql+zxjdbc://user:pass@host:port/dbname[?key=value&key=value...]

AdoDBAPI

Support for the Microsoft SQL Server database via the adodbapi driver.

DBAPI

Documentation and download information (if applicable) for adodbapi is available at: http://adodbapi.sourceforge.net/

Connecting

Connect String:

mssql+adodbapi://<username>:<password>@<dsnname>

주석

The adodbapi dialect is not implemented SQLAlchemy versions 0.6 and above at this time.