Psycopg 3 - PostgreSQL database adapter for Python #

Psycopg 3 is a newly designed PostgreSQL database adapter for the Python programming language.

Psycopg 3 presents a familiar interface for everyone who has used Psycopg 2 or any other DB-API 2.0 database adapter, but allows to use more modern PostgreSQL and Python features, such as:

Documentation #

Getting started with Psycopg 3 #

This section of the documentation will explain how to install Psycopg and how to perform normal activities such as querying the database or loading data using COPY .

Important

If you are familiar with psycopg2 please take a look at Differences from psycopg2 to see what is changed.

Installation #

In short, if you use a supported system :

pip install --upgrade pip           # upgrade pip to at least 20.3
pip install "psycopg[binary]"

and you should be ready to start . Read further for alternative ways to install.

Supported systems #

The Psycopg version documented here has official and tested support for:

  • Python: from version 3.7 to 3.11

    • Python 3.6 supported before Psycopg 3.1

  • PostgreSQL: from version 10 to 15

  • OS: Linux, macOS, Windows

The tests to verify the supported systems run in Github workflows : anything that is not tested there is not officially supported. This includes:

  • Unofficial Python distributions such as Conda;

  • Alternative PostgreSQL implementation;

  • macOS hardware and releases not available on Github workflows.

If you use an unsupported system, things might work (because, for instance, the database may use the same wire protocol as PostgreSQL) but we cannot guarantee the correct working or a smooth ride.

Binary installation #

The quickest way to start developing with Psycopg 3 is to install the binary packages by running:

pip install "psycopg[binary]"

This will install a self-contained package with all the libraries needed. You will need pip 20.3 at least : please run pip install --upgrade pip to update it beforehand.

The above package should work in most situations. It will not work in some cases though.

If your platform is not supported you should proceed to a local installation or a pure Python installation .

See also

Did Psycopg 3 install ok? Great! You can now move on to the basic module usage to learn how it works.

Keep on reading if the above method didn’t work and you need a different way to install Psycopg 3.

For further information about the differences between the packages see pq module implementations .

Local installation #

A "Local installation" results in a performing and maintainable library. The library will include the speed-up C module and will be linked to the system libraries ( libpq , libssl …) so that system upgrade of libraries will upgrade the libraries used by Psycopg 3 too. This is the preferred way to install Psycopg for a production site.

In order to perform a local installation you need some prerequisites:

  • a C compiler,

  • Python development headers (e.g. the python3-dev package).

  • PostgreSQL client development headers (e.g. the libpq-dev package).

  • The pg_config program available in the PATH .

You must be able to troubleshoot an extension build, for instance you must be able to read your compiler’s error message. If you are not, please don’t try this and follow the binary installation instead.

If your build prerequisites are in place you can run:

pip install "psycopg[c]"
Pure Python installation #

If you simply install:

pip install psycopg

without [c] or [binary] extras you will obtain a pure Python implementation. This is particularly handy to debug and hack, but it still requires the system libpq to operate (which will be imported dynamically via ctypes ).

In order to use the pure Python installation you will need the libpq installed in the system: for instance on Debian system you will probably need:

sudo apt install libpq5

Note

The libpq is the client library used by psql , the PostgreSQL command line client, to connect to the database. On most systems, installing psql will install the libpq too as a dependency.

If you are not able to fulfill this requirement please follow the binary installation .

Installing the connection pool #

The Psycopg connection pools are distributed in a separate package from the psycopg package itself, in order to allow a different release cycle.

In order to use the pool you must install the pool extra, using pip install "psycopg[pool]" , or install the psycopg_pool package separately, which would allow to specify the release to install more precisely.

Handling dependencies #

If you need to specify your project dependencies (for instance in a requirements.txt file, setup.py , pyproject.toml dependencies…) you should probably specify one of the following:

  • If your project is a library, add a dependency on psycopg . This will make sure that your library will have the psycopg package with the right interface and leaves the possibility of choosing a specific implementation to the end user of your library.

  • If your project is a final application (e.g. a service running on a server) you can require a specific implementation, for instance psycopg[c] , after you have made sure that the prerequisites are met (e.g. the depending libraries and tools are installed in the host machine).

In both cases you can specify which version of Psycopg to use using requirement specifiers .

If you want to make sure that a specific implementation is used you can specify the PSYCOPG_IMPL environment variable: importing the library will fail if the implementation specified is not available. See pq module implementations .

Basic module usage #

The basic Psycopg usage is common to all the database adapters implementing the DB-API protocol. Other database adapters, such as the builtin sqlite3 or psycopg2 , have roughly the same pattern of interaction.

Main objects in Psycopg 3 #

Here is an interactive session showing some of the basic commands:

# Note: the module name is psycopg, not psycopg3
import psycopg

# Connect to an existing database
with psycopg.connect("dbname=test user=postgres") as conn:

    # Open a cursor to perform database operations
    with conn.cursor() as cur:

        # Execute a command: this creates a new table
        cur.execute("""
            CREATE TABLE test (
                id serial PRIMARY KEY,
                num integer,
                data text)
            """)

        # Pass data to fill a query placeholders and let Psycopg perform
        # the correct conversion (no SQL injections!)
        cur.execute(
            "INSERT INTO test (num, data) VALUES (%s, %s)",
            (100, "abc'def"))

        # Query the database and obtain data as Python objects.
        cur.execute("SELECT * FROM test")
        cur.fetchone()
        # will return (1, 100, "abc'def")

        # You can use `cur.fetchmany()`, `cur.fetchall()` to return a list
        # of several records, or even iterate on the cursor
        for record in cur:
            print(record)

        # Make the changes to the database persistent
        conn.commit()

In the example you can see some of the main objects and methods and how they relate to each other:

See also

A few important topics you will have to deal with are:

Shortcuts #

The pattern above is familiar to psycopg2 users. However, Psycopg 3 also exposes a few simple extensions which make the above pattern leaner:

  • the Connection objects exposes an execute() method, equivalent to creating a cursor, calling its execute() method, and returning it.

    # In Psycopg 2
    cur = conn.cursor()
    cur.execute(...)
    
    # In Psycopg 3
    cur = conn.execute(...)
    
  • The Cursor.execute() method returns self . This means that you can chain a fetch operation, such as fetchone() , to the execute() call:

    # In Psycopg 2
    cur.execute(...)
    record = cur.fetchone()
    
    cur.execute(...)
    for record in cur:
        ...
    
    # In Psycopg 3
    record = cur.execute(...).fetchone()
    
    for record in cur.execute(...):
        ...
    

Using them together, in simple cases, you can go from creating a connection to using a result in a single expression:

print(psycopg.connect(DSN).execute("SELECT now()").fetchone()[0])
# 2042-07-12 18:15:10.706497+01:00
Connection context #

Psycopg 3 Connection can be used as a context manager:

with psycopg.connect() as conn:
    ... # use the connection

# the connection is now closed

When the block is exited, if there is a transaction open, it will be committed. If an exception is raised within the block the transaction is rolled back. In both cases the connection is closed. It is roughly the equivalent of:

conn = psycopg.connect()
try:
    ... # use the connection
except BaseException:
    conn.rollback()
else:
    conn.commit()
finally:
    conn.close()

Note

This behaviour is not what psycopg2 does: in psycopg2 there is no final close() and the connection can be used in several with statements to manage different transactions. This behaviour has been considered non-standard and surprising so it has been replaced by the more explicit transaction() block.

Note that, while the above pattern is what most people would use, connect() doesn’t enter a block itself, but returns an "un-entered" connection, so that it is still possible to use a connection regardless of the code scope and the developer is free to use (and responsible for calling) commit() , rollback() , close() as and where needed.

Warning

If a connection is just left to go out of scope, the way it will behave with or without the use of a with block is different:

  • if the connection is used without a with block, the server will find a connection closed INTRANS and roll back the current transaction;

  • if the connection is used with a with block, there will be an explicit COMMIT and the operations will be finalised.

You should use a with block when your intention is just to execute a set of operations and then committing the result, which is the most usual thing to do with a connection. If your connection life cycle and transaction pattern is different, and want more control on it, the use without with might be more convenient.

See Transactions management for more information.

AsyncConnection can be also used as context manager, using async with , but be careful about its quirkiness: see with async connections for details.

Adapting pyscopg to your program #

The above pattern of use only shows the default behaviour of the adapter. Psycopg can be customised in several ways, to allow the smoothest integration between your Python program and your PostgreSQL database:

Passing parameters to SQL queries #

Most of the times, writing a program you will have to mix bits of SQL statements with values provided by the rest of the program:

SELECT some, fields FROM some_table WHERE id = ...

id equals what? Probably you will have a Python value you are looking for.

execute() arguments #

Passing parameters to a SQL statement happens in functions such as Cursor.execute() by using %s placeholders in the SQL statement, and passing a sequence of values as the second argument of the function. For example the Python function call:

cur.execute("""
    INSERT INTO some_table (id, created_at, last_name)
    VALUES (%s, %s, %s);
    """,
    (10, datetime.date(2020, 11, 18), "O'Reilly"))

is roughly equivalent to the SQL command:

INSERT INTO some_table (id, created_at, last_name)
VALUES (10, '2020-11-18', 'O''Reilly');

Note that the parameters will not be really merged to the query: query and the parameters are sent to the server separately: see Server-side binding for details.

Named arguments are supported too using %( name )s placeholders in the query and specifying the values into a mapping. Using named arguments allows to specify the values in any order and to repeat the same value in several places in the query:

cur.execute("""
    INSERT INTO some_table (id, created_at, updated_at, last_name)
    VALUES (%(id)s, %(created)s, %(created)s, %(name)s);
    """,
    {'id': 10, 'name': "O'Reilly", 'created': datetime.date(2020, 11, 18)})

Using characters % , ( , ) in the argument names is not supported.

When parameters are used, in order to include a literal % in the query you can use the %% string:

cur.execute("SELECT (%s % 2) = 0 AS even", (10,))       # WRONG
cur.execute("SELECT (%s %% 2) = 0 AS even", (10,))      # correct

While the mechanism resembles regular Python strings manipulation, there are a few subtle differences you should care about when passing parameters to a query.

  • The Python string operator % must not be used : the execute() method accepts a tuple or dictionary of values as second parameter. Never use % or + to merge values into queries :

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES (%s, %s)" % (10, 20)) # WRONG
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES (%s, %s)", (10, 20))  # correct
    
  • For positional variables binding, the second argument must always be a sequence , even if it contains a single variable (remember that Python requires a comma to create a single element tuple):

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)", "bar")    # WRONG
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)", ("bar"))  # WRONG
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)", ("bar",)) # correct
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)", ["bar"])  # correct
    
  • The placeholder must not be quoted :

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES ('%s')", ("Hello",)) # WRONG
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))   # correct
    
  • The variables placeholder must always be a %s , even if a different placeholder (such as a %d for integers or %f for floats) may look more appropriate for the type. You may find other placeholders used in Psycopg queries ( %b and %t ) but they are not related to the type of the argument: see Binary parameters and results if you want to read more:

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES (%d)", (10,))   # WRONG
    cur.execute("INSERT INTO numbers VALUES (%s)", (10,))   # correct
    
  • Only query values should be bound via this method: it shouldn’t be used to merge table or field names to the query. If you need to generate SQL queries dynamically (for instance choosing a table name at runtime) you can use the functionalities provided in the psycopg.sql module:

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO %s VALUES (%s)", ('numbers', 10))  # WRONG
    cur.execute(                                                # correct
        SQL("INSERT INTO {} VALUES (%s)").format(Identifier('numbers')),
        (10,))
    
Danger: SQL injection #

The SQL representation of many data types is often different from their Python string representation. The typical example is with single quotes in strings: in SQL single quotes are used as string literal delimiters, so the ones appearing inside the string itself must be escaped, whereas in Python single quotes can be left unescaped if the string is delimited by double quotes.

Because of the difference, sometimes subtle, between the data types representations, a naïve approach to query strings composition, such as using Python strings concatenation, is a recipe for terrible problems:

SQL = "INSERT INTO authors (name) VALUES ('%s')" # NEVER DO THIS
data = ("O'Reilly", )
cur.execute(SQL % data) # THIS WILL FAIL MISERABLY
# SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "Reilly"

If the variables containing the data to send to the database come from an untrusted source (such as data coming from a form on a web site) an attacker could easily craft a malformed string, either gaining access to unauthorized data or performing destructive operations on the database. This form of attack is called SQL injection and is known to be one of the most widespread forms of attack on database systems. Before continuing, please print this page as a memo and hang it onto your desk.

Psycopg can automatically convert Python objects to SQL values : using this feature your code will be more robust and reliable. We must stress this point:

Warning

  • Don’t manually merge values to a query: hackers from a foreign country will break into your computer and steal not only your disks, but also your cds, leaving you only with the three most embarrassing records you ever bought. On cassette tapes.

  • If you use the % operator to merge values to a query, con artists will seduce your cat, who will run away taking your credit card and your sunglasses with them.

  • If you use + to merge a textual value to a string, bad guys in balaclava will find their way to your fridge, drink all your beer, and leave your toilet seat up and your toilet paper in the wrong orientation.

  • You don’t want to manually merge values to a query: use the provided methods instead.

The correct way to pass variables in a SQL command is using the second argument of the Cursor.execute() method:

SQL = "INSERT INTO authors (name) VALUES (%s)"  # Note: no quotes
data = ("O'Reilly", )
cur.execute(SQL, data)  # Note: no % operator

Note

Python static code checkers are not quite there yet, but, in the future, it will be possible to check your code for improper use of string expressions in queries. See Checking literal strings in queries for details.

See also

Now that you know how to pass parameters to queries, you can take a look at how Psycopg converts data types .

Binary parameters and results #

PostgreSQL has two different ways to transmit data between client and server: TEXT , always available, and BINARY , available most of the times but not always. Usually the binary format is more efficient to use.

Psycopg can support both formats for each data type. Whenever a value is passed to a query using the normal %s placeholder, the best format available is chosen (often, but not always, the binary format is picked as the best choice).

If you have a reason to select explicitly the binary format or the text format for a value you can use respectively a %b placeholder or a %t placeholder instead of the normal %s . execute() will fail if a Dumper for the right data type and format is not available.

The same two formats, text or binary, are used by PostgreSQL to return data from a query to the client. Unlike with parameters, where you can choose the format value-by-value, all the columns returned by a query will have the same format. Every type returned by the query should have a Loader configured, otherwise the data will be returned as unparsed str (for text results) or buffer (for binary results).

Note

The pg_type table defines which format is supported for each PostgreSQL data type. Text input/output is managed by the functions declared in the typinput and typoutput fields (always present), binary input/output is managed by the typsend and typreceive (which are optional).

Because not every PostgreSQL type supports binary output, by default, the data will be returned in text format. In order to return data in binary format you can create the cursor using Connection.cursor (binary=True) or execute the query using Cursor.execute (binary=True) . A case in which requesting binary results is a clear winner is when you have large binary data in the database, such as images:

cur.execute(
    "SELECT image_data FROM images WHERE id = %s", [image_id], binary=True)
data = cur.fetchone()[0]

Adapting basic Python types #

Many standard Python types are adapted into SQL and returned as Python objects when a query is executed.

Converting the following data types between Python and PostgreSQL works out-of-the-box and doesn’t require any configuration. In case you need to customise the conversion you should take a look at Data adaptation configuration .

Booleans adaptation #

Python bool values True and False are converted to the equivalent PostgreSQL boolean type :

>>> cur.execute("SELECT %s, %s", (True, False))
# equivalent to "SELECT true, false"
Numbers adaptation #
  • Python int values can be converted to PostgreSQL smallint , integer , bigint , or numeric , according to their numeric value. Psycopg will choose the smallest data type available, because PostgreSQL can automatically cast a type up (e.g. passing a smallint where PostgreSQL expect an integer is gladly accepted) but will not cast down automatically (e.g. if a function has an integer argument, passing it a bigint value will fail, even if the value is 1).

  • Python float values are converted to PostgreSQL float8 .

  • Python Decimal values are converted to PostgreSQL numeric .

On the way back, smaller types ( int2 , int4 , float4 ) are promoted to the larger Python counterpart.

Note

Sometimes you may prefer to receive numeric data as float instead, for performance reason or ease of manipulation: you can configure an adapter to cast PostgreSQL numeric to Python float . This of course may imply a loss of precision.

Strings adaptation #

Python str are converted to PostgreSQL string syntax, and PostgreSQL types such as text and varchar are converted back to Python str :

conn = psycopg.connect()
conn.execute(
    "INSERT INTO menu (id, entry) VALUES (%s, %s)",
    (1, "Crème Brûlée at 4.99€"))
conn.execute("SELECT entry FROM menu WHERE id = 1").fetchone()[0]
'Crème Brûlée at 4.99€'

PostgreSQL databases have an encoding , and the session has an encoding too, exposed in the Connection.info. encoding attribute. If your database and connection are in UTF-8 encoding you will likely have no problem, otherwise you will have to make sure that your application only deals with the non-ASCII chars that the database can handle; failing to do so may result in encoding/decoding errors:

# The encoding is set at connection time according to the db configuration
conn.info.encoding
'utf-8'

# The Latin-9 encoding can manage some European accented letters
# and the Euro symbol
conn.execute("SET client_encoding TO LATIN9")
conn.execute("SELECT entry FROM menu WHERE id = 1").fetchone()[0]
'Crème Brûlée at 4.99€'

# The Latin-1 encoding doesn't have a representation for the Euro symbol
conn.execute("SET client_encoding TO LATIN1")
conn.execute("SELECT entry FROM menu WHERE id = 1").fetchone()[0]
# Traceback (most recent call last)
# ...
# UntranslatableCharacter: character with byte sequence 0xe2 0x82 0xac
# in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "LATIN1"

In rare cases you may have strings with unexpected encodings in the database. Using the SQL_ASCII client encoding will disable decoding of the data coming from the database, which will be returned as bytes :

conn.execute("SET client_encoding TO SQL_ASCII")
conn.execute("SELECT entry FROM menu WHERE id = 1").fetchone()[0]
b'Cr\xc3\xa8me Br\xc3\xbbl\xc3\xa9e at 4.99\xe2\x82\xac'

Alternatively you can cast the unknown encoding data to bytea to retrieve it as bytes, leaving other strings unaltered: see Binary adaptation

Note that PostgreSQL text cannot contain the 0x00 byte. If you need to store Python strings that may contain binary zeros you should use a bytea field.

Binary adaptation #

Python types representing binary objects ( bytes , bytearray , memoryview ) are converted by default to bytea fields. By default data received is returned as bytes .

If you are storing large binary data in bytea fields (such as binary documents or images) you should probably use the binary format to pass and return values, otherwise binary data will undergo ASCII escaping , taking some CPU time and more bandwidth. See Binary parameters and results for details.

Date/time types adaptation #
  • Python date objects are converted to PostgreSQL date .

  • Python datetime objects are converted to PostgreSQL timestamp (if they don’t have a tzinfo set) or timestamptz (if they do).

  • Python time objects are converted to PostgreSQL time (if they don’t have a tzinfo set) or timetz (if they do).

  • Python timedelta objects are converted to PostgreSQL interval .

PostgreSQL timestamptz values are returned with a timezone set to the connection TimeZone setting , which is available as a Python ZoneInfo object in the Connection.info . timezone attribute:

>>> conn.info.timezone
zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='Europe/London')

>>> conn.execute("select '2048-07-08 12:00'::timestamptz").fetchone()[0]
datetime.datetime(2048, 7, 8, 12, 0, tzinfo=zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='Europe/London'))

Note

PostgreSQL timestamptz doesn’t store "a timestamp with a timezone attached": it stores a timestamp always in UTC, which is converted, on output, to the connection TimeZone setting:

>>> conn.execute("SET TIMEZONE to 'Europe/Rome'")  # UTC+2 in summer
>>> conn.execute("SELECT '2042-07-01 12:00Z'::timestamptz").fetchone()[0]  # UTC input
datetime.datetime(2042, 7, 1, 14, 0, tzinfo=zoneinfo.ZoneInfo(key='Europe/Rome'))

Check out the PostgreSQL documentation about timezones for all the details.

JSON adaptation #

Psycopg can map between Python objects and PostgreSQL json/jsonb types , allowing to customise the load and dump function used.

Because several Python objects could be considered JSON (dicts, lists, scalars, even date/time if using a dumps function customised to use them), Psycopg requires you to wrap the object to dump as JSON into a wrapper: either psycopg.types.json.Json or Jsonb .

from psycopg.types.json import Jsonb

thing = {"foo": ["bar", 42]}
conn.execute("INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (%s)", [Jsonb(thing)])

By default Psycopg uses the standard library json.dumps and json.loads functions to serialize and de-serialize Python objects to JSON. If you want to customise how serialization happens, for instance changing serialization parameters or using a different JSON library, you can specify your own functions using the psycopg.types.json.set_json_dumps() and set_json_loads() functions, to apply either globally or to a specific context (connection or cursor).

from functools import partial
from psycopg.types.json import Jsonb, set_json_dumps, set_json_loads
import ujson

# Use a faster dump function
set_json_dumps(ujson.dumps)

# Return floating point values as Decimal, just in one connection
set_json_loads(partial(json.loads, parse_float=Decimal), conn)

conn.execute("SELECT %s", [Jsonb({"value": 123.45})]).fetchone()[0]
# {'value': Decimal('123.45')}

If you need an even more specific dump customisation only for certain objects (including different configurations in the same query) you can specify a dumps parameter in the Json / Jsonb wrapper, which will take precedence over what is specified by set_json_dumps() .

from uuid import UUID, uuid4

class UUIDEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
    """A JSON encoder which can dump UUID."""
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, UUID):
            return str(obj)
        return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)

uuid_dumps = partial(json.dumps, cls=UUIDEncoder)
obj = {"uuid": uuid4()}
cnn.execute("INSERT INTO objs VALUES %s", [Json(obj, dumps=uuid_dumps)])
# will insert: {'uuid': '0a40799d-3980-4c65-8315-2956b18ab0e1'}
Lists adaptation #

Python list objects are adapted to PostgreSQL arrays and back. Only lists containing objects of the same type can be dumped to PostgreSQL (but the list may contain None elements).

Note

If you have a list of values which you want to use with the IN operator… don’t. It won’t work (neither with a list nor with a tuple):

>>> conn.execute("SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id IN %s", [[10,20,30]])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
psycopg.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "$1"
LINE 1: SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id IN $1
                                          ^

What you want to do instead is to use the ‘= ANY()’ expression and pass the values as a list (not a tuple).

>>> conn.execute("SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id = ANY(%s)", [[10,20,30]])

This has also the advantage of working with an empty list, whereas IN () is not valid SQL.

UUID adaptation #

Python uuid.UUID objects are adapted to PostgreSQL UUID type and back:

>>> conn.execute("select gen_random_uuid()").fetchone()[0]
UUID('97f0dd62-3bd2-459e-89b8-a5e36ea3c16c')

>>> from uuid import uuid4
>>> conn.execute("select gen_random_uuid() = %s", [uuid4()]).fetchone()[0]
False  # long shot
Network data types adaptation #

Objects from the ipaddress module are converted to PostgreSQL network address types :

>>> conn.execute("select '192.168.0.1'::inet, '192.168.0.1/24'::inet").fetchone()
(IPv4Address('192.168.0.1'), IPv4Interface('192.168.0.1/24'))

>>> conn.execute("select '::ffff:1.2.3.0/120'::cidr").fetchone()[0]
IPv6Network('::ffff:102:300/120')
Enum adaptation #

New in version 3.1.

Psycopg can adapt Python Enum subclasses into PostgreSQL enum types (created with the CREATE TYPE ... AS ENUM (...) command).

In order to set up a bidirectional enum mapping, you should get information about the PostgreSQL enum using the EnumInfo class and register it using register_enum() . The behaviour of unregistered and registered enums is different.

  • If the enum is not registered with register_enum() :

    • Pure Enum classes are dumped as normal strings, using their member names as value. The unknown oid is used, so PostgreSQL should be able to use this string in most contexts (such as an enum or a text field).

      Changed in version 3.1: In previous version dumping pure enums is not supported and raise a "cannot adapt" error.

    • Mix-in enums are dumped according to their mix-in type (because a class MyIntEnum(int, Enum) is more specifically an int than an Enum , so it’s dumped by default according to int rules).

    • PostgreSQL enums are loaded as Python strings. If you want to load arrays of such enums you will have to find their OIDs using types.TypeInfo.fetch() and register them using register() .

  • If the enum is registered (using EnumInfo .fetch() and register_enum() ):

    • Enums classes, both pure and mixed-in, are dumped by name.

    • The registered PostgreSQL enum is loaded back as the registered Python enum members.

class psycopg.types.enum. EnumInfo ( name , oid , array_oid , labels ) #

Manage information about an enum type.

EnumInfo is a subclass of TypeInfo : refer to the latter’s documentation for generic usage, especially the fetch() method.

labels #

After fetch() , it contains the labels defined in the PostgreSQL enum type.

enum #

After register_enum() is called, it will contain the Python type mapping to the registered enum.

psycopg.types.enum. register_enum ( info , context = None , enum = None , * , mapping = None ) #

Register the adapters to load and dump a enum type.

Parameters :

After registering, fetching data of the registered enum will cast PostgreSQL enum labels into corresponding Python enum members.

If no enum is specified, a new Enum is created based on PostgreSQL enum labels.

Example:

>>> from enum import Enum, auto
>>> from psycopg.types.enum import EnumInfo, register_enum

>>> class UserRole(Enum):
...     ADMIN = auto()
...     EDITOR = auto()
...     GUEST = auto()

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TYPE user_role AS ENUM ('ADMIN', 'EDITOR', 'GUEST')")

>>> info = EnumInfo.fetch(conn, "user_role")
>>> register_enum(info, conn, UserRole)

>>> some_editor = info.enum.EDITOR
>>> some_editor


>>> conn.execute(
...     "SELECT pg_typeof(%(editor)s), %(editor)s",
...     {"editor": some_editor}
... ).fetchone()
('user_role', )

>>> conn.execute(
...     "SELECT ARRAY[%s, %s]",
...     [UserRole.ADMIN, UserRole.GUEST]
... ).fetchone()
[, ]

If the Python and the PostgreSQL enum don’t match 1:1 (for instance if members have a different name, or if more than one Python enum should map to the same PostgreSQL enum, or vice versa), you can specify the exceptions using the mapping parameter.

mapping should be a dictionary with Python enum members as keys and the matching PostgreSQL enum labels as values, or a list of (member, label) pairs with the same meaning (useful when some members are repeated). Order matters: if an element on either side is specified more than once, the last pair in the sequence will take precedence:

# Legacy roles, defined in medieval times.
>>> conn.execute(
...     "CREATE TYPE abbey_role AS ENUM ('ABBOT', 'SCRIBE', 'MONK', 'GUEST')")

>>> info = EnumInfo.fetch(conn, "abbey_role")
>>> register_enum(info, conn, UserRole, mapping=[
...     (UserRole.ADMIN, "ABBOT"),
...     (UserRole.EDITOR, "SCRIBE"),
...     (UserRole.EDITOR, "MONK")])

>>> conn.execute("SELECT '{ABBOT,SCRIBE,MONK,GUEST}'::abbey_role[]").fetchone()[0]
[<UserRole.ADMIN: 1>,
 <UserRole.EDITOR: 2>,
 <UserRole.EDITOR: 2>,
 <UserRole.GUEST: 3>]

>>> conn.execute("SELECT %s::text[]", [list(UserRole)]).fetchone()[0]
['ABBOT', 'MONK', 'GUEST']

A particularly useful case is when the PostgreSQL labels match the values of a str -based Enum. In this case it is possible to use something like {m: m.value for m in enum} as mapping:

>>> class LowercaseRole(str, Enum):
...     ADMIN = "admin"
...     EDITOR = "editor"
...     GUEST = "guest"

>>> conn.execute(
...     "CREATE TYPE lowercase_role AS ENUM ('admin', 'editor', 'guest')")

>>> info = EnumInfo.fetch(conn, "lowercase_role")
>>> register_enum(
...     info, conn, LowercaseRole, mapping={m: m.value for m in LowercaseRole})

>>> conn.execute("SELECT 'editor'::lowercase_role").fetchone()[0]

Adapting other PostgreSQL types #

PostgreSQL offers other data types which don’t map to native Python types. Psycopg offers wrappers and conversion functions to allow their use.

Composite types casting #

Psycopg can adapt PostgreSQL composite types (either created with the CREATE TYPE command or implicitly defined after a table row type) to and from Python tuples, namedtuple , or any other suitable object configured.

Before using a composite type it is necessary to get information about it using the CompositeInfo class and to register it using register_composite() .

class psycopg.types.composite. CompositeInfo ( name , oid , array_oid , * , regtype = '' , field_names , field_types ) #

Manage information about a composite type.

CompositeInfo is a TypeInfo subclass: check its documentation for the generic usage, especially the fetch() method.

python_type #

After register_composite() is called, it will contain the python type mapping to the registered composite.

psycopg.types.composite. register_composite ( info , context = None , factory = None ) #

Register the adapters to load and dump a composite type.

Parameters :
  • info ( CompositeInfo ) - The object with the information about the composite to register.

  • context ( Optional [ AdaptContext ]) - The context where to register the adapters. If None , register it globally.

  • factory ( Optional [ Callable [ ... , Any ]]) - Callable to convert the sequence of attributes read from the composite into a Python object.

Note

Registering the adapters doesn’t affect objects already created, even if they are children of the registered context. For instance, registering the adapter globally doesn’t affect already existing connections.

After registering, fetching data of the registered composite will invoke factory to create corresponding Python objects.

If no factory is specified, a namedtuple is created and used to return data.

If the factory is a type (and not a generic callable), then dumpers for that type are created and registered too, so that passing objects of that type to a query will adapt them to the registered type.

Example:

>>> from psycopg.types.composite import CompositeInfo, register_composite

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TYPE card AS (value int, suit text)")

>>> info = CompositeInfo.fetch(conn, "card")
>>> register_composite(info, conn)

>>> my_card = info.python_type(8, "hearts")
>>> my_card
card(value=8, suit='hearts')

>>> conn.execute(
...     "SELECT pg_typeof(%(card)s), (%(card)s).suit", {"card": my_card}
...     ).fetchone()
('card', 'hearts')

>>> conn.execute("SELECT (%s, %s)::card", [1, "spades"]).fetchone()[0]
card(value=1, suit='spades')

Nested composite types are handled as expected, provided that the type of the composite components are registered as well:

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TYPE card_back AS (face card, back text)")

>>> info2 = CompositeInfo.fetch(conn, "card_back")
>>> register_composite(info2, conn)

>>> conn.execute("SELECT ((8, 'hearts'), 'blue')::card_back").fetchone()[0]
card_back(face=card(value=8, suit='hearts'), back='blue')
Range adaptation #

PostgreSQL range types are a family of data types representing a range of values between two elements. The type of the element is called the range subtype . PostgreSQL offers a few built-in range types and allows the definition of custom ones.

All the PostgreSQL range types are loaded as the Range Python type, which is a Generic type and can hold bounds of different types.

class psycopg.types.range. Range ( lower = None , upper = None , bounds = '[)' , empty = False ) #

Python representation for a PostgreSQL range type.

Parameters :
  • lower ( Optional [ TypeVar ( T )]) - lower bound for the range. None means unbound

  • upper ( Optional [ TypeVar ( T )]) - upper bound for the range. None means unbound

  • bounds ( str ) - one of the literal strings () , [) , (] , [] , representing whether the lower or upper bounds are included

  • empty ( bool ) - if True , the range is empty

This Python type is only used to pass and retrieve range values to and from PostgreSQL and doesn’t attempt to replicate the PostgreSQL range features: it doesn’t perform normalization and doesn’t implement all the operators supported by the database.

PostgreSQL will perform normalisation on Range objects used as query parameters, so, when they are fetched back, they will be found in the normal form (for instance ranges on integers will have [) bounds).

Range objects are immutable, hashable, and support the in operator (checking if an element is within the range). They can be tested for equivalence. Empty ranges evaluate to False in a boolean context, nonempty ones evaluate to True .

Range objects have the following attributes:

isempty #

True if the range is empty.

lower #

The lower bound of the range. None if empty or unbound.

upper #

The upper bound of the range. None if empty or unbound.

lower_inc #

True if the lower bound is included in the range.

upper_inc #

True if the upper bound is included in the range.

lower_inf #

True if the range doesn’t have a lower bound.

upper_inf #

True if the range doesn’t have an upper bound.

The built-in range objects are adapted automatically: if a Range objects contains date bounds, it is dumped using the daterange OID, and of course daterange values are loaded back as Range[date] .

If you create your own range type you can use RangeInfo and register_range() to associate the range type with its subtype and make it work like the builtin ones.

class psycopg.types.range. RangeInfo ( name , oid , array_oid , * , regtype = '' , subtype_oid ) #

Manage information about a range type.

RangeInfo is a TypeInfo subclass: check its documentation for generic details, especially the fetch() method.

psycopg.types.range. register_range ( info , context = None ) #

Register the adapters to load and dump a range type.

Parameters :
  • info ( RangeInfo ) - The object with the information about the range to register.

  • context ( Optional [ AdaptContext ]) - The context where to register the adapters. If None , register it globally.

Register loaders so that loading data of this type will result in a Range with bounds parsed as the right subtype.

Note

Registering the adapters doesn’t affect objects already created, even if they are children of the registered context. For instance, registering the adapter globally doesn’t affect already existing connections.

Example:

>>> from psycopg.types.range import Range, RangeInfo, register_range

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TYPE strrange AS RANGE (SUBTYPE = text)")
>>> info = RangeInfo.fetch(conn, "strrange")
>>> register_range(info, conn)

>>> conn.execute("SELECT pg_typeof(%s)", [Range("a", "z")]).fetchone()[0]
'strrange'

>>> conn.execute("SELECT '[a,z]'::strrange").fetchone()[0]
Range('a', 'z', '[]')
Multirange adaptation #

Since PostgreSQL 14, every range type is associated with a multirange , a type representing a disjoint set of ranges. A multirange is automatically available for every range, built-in and user-defined.

All the PostgreSQL range types are loaded as the Multirange Python type, which is a mutable sequence of Range elements.

class psycopg.types.multirange. Multirange ( items = () ) #

Python representation for a PostgreSQL multirange type.

Parameters :

items ( Iterable [ Range [ TypeVar ( T )]]) - Sequence of ranges to initialise the object.

This Python type is only used to pass and retrieve multirange values to and from PostgreSQL and doesn’t attempt to replicate the PostgreSQL multirange features: overlapping items are not merged, empty ranges are not discarded, the items are not ordered, the behaviour of multirange operators is not replicated in Python.

PostgreSQL will perform normalisation on Multirange objects used as query parameters, so, when they are fetched back, they will be found ordered, with overlapping ranges merged, etc.

Multirange objects are a MutableSequence and are totally ordered: they behave pretty much like a list of Range . Like Range, they are Generic on the subtype of their range, so you can declare a variable to be Multirange[date] and mypy will complain if you try to add it a Range[Decimal] .

Like for Range , built-in multirange objects are adapted automatically: if a Multirange object contains Range with date bounds, it is dumped using the datemultirange OID, and datemultirange values are loaded back as Multirange[date] .

If you have created your own range type you can use MultirangeInfo and register_multirange() to associate the resulting multirange type with its subtype and make it work like the builtin ones.

class psycopg.types.multirange. MultirangeInfo ( name , oid , array_oid , * , regtype = '' , range_oid , subtype_oid ) #

Manage information about a multirange type.

MultirangeInfo is a TypeInfo subclass: check its documentation for generic details, especially the fetch() method.

psycopg.types.multirange. register_multirange ( info , context = None ) #

Register the adapters to load and dump a multirange type.

Parameters :
  • info ( MultirangeInfo ) - The object with the information about the range to register.

  • context ( Optional [ AdaptContext ]) - The context where to register the adapters. If None , register it globally.

Register loaders so that loading data of this type will result in a Range with bounds parsed as the right subtype.

Note

Registering the adapters doesn’t affect objects already created, even if they are children of the registered context. For instance, registering the adapter globally doesn’t affect already existing connections.

Example:

>>> from psycopg.types.multirange import \
...     Multirange, MultirangeInfo, register_multirange
>>> from psycopg.types.range import Range

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TYPE strrange AS RANGE (SUBTYPE = text)")
>>> info = MultirangeInfo.fetch(conn, "strmultirange")
>>> register_multirange(info, conn)

>>> rec = conn.execute(
...     "SELECT pg_typeof(%(mr)s), %(mr)s",
...     {"mr": Multirange([Range("a", "q"), Range("l", "z")])}).fetchone()

>>> rec[0]
'strmultirange'
>>> rec[1]
Multirange([Range('a', 'z', '[)')])
Hstore adaptation #

The hstore data type is a key-value store embedded in PostgreSQL. It supports GiST or GIN indexes allowing search by keys or key/value pairs as well as regular BTree indexes for equality, uniqueness etc.

Psycopg can convert Python dict objects to and from hstore structures. Only dictionaries with string keys and values are supported. None is also allowed as value but not as a key.

In order to use the hstore data type it is necessary to load it in a database using:

=# CREATE EXTENSION hstore;

Because hstore is distributed as a contrib module, its oid is not well known, so it is necessary to use TypeInfo . fetch() to query the database and get its oid. The resulting object can be passed to register_hstore() to configure dumping dict to hstore and parsing hstore back to dict , in the context where the adapter is registered.

psycopg.types.hstore. register_hstore ( info , context = None ) #

Register the adapters to load and dump hstore.

Parameters :
  • info ( TypeInfo ) - The object with the information about the hstore type.

  • context ( Optional [ AdaptContext ]) - The context where to register the adapters. If None , register it globally.

Note

Registering the adapters doesn’t affect objects already created, even if they are children of the registered context. For instance, registering the adapter globally doesn’t affect already existing connections.

Example:

>>> from psycopg.types import TypeInfo
>>> from psycopg.types.hstore import register_hstore

>>> info = TypeInfo.fetch(conn, "hstore")
>>> register_hstore(info, conn)

>>> conn.execute("SELECT pg_typeof(%s)", [{"a": "b"}]).fetchone()[0]
'hstore'

>>> conn.execute("SELECT 'foo => bar'::hstore").fetchone()[0]
{'foo': 'bar'}
Geometry adaptation using Shapely #

When using the PostGIS extension, it can be useful to retrieve geometry values and have them automatically converted to Shapely instances. Likewise, you may want to store such instances in the database and have the conversion happen automatically.

Warning

Psycopg doesn’t have a dependency on the shapely package: you should install the library as an additional dependency of your project.

Warning

This module is experimental and might be changed in the future according to users’ feedback.

Since PostgGIS is an extension, the geometry type oid is not well known, so it is necessary to use TypeInfo . fetch() to query the database and find it. The resulting object can be passed to register_shapely() to configure dumping shape instances to geometry columns and parsing geometry data back to shape instances, in the context where the adapters are registered.

psycopg.types.shapely. register_shapely ( ) #

Register Shapely dumper and loaders.

After invoking this function on an adapter, the queries retrieving PostGIS geometry objects will return Shapely’s shape object instances both in text and binary mode.

Similarly, shape objects can be sent to the database.

This requires the Shapely library to be installed.

Parameters :
  • info - The object with the information about the geometry type.

  • context - The context where to register the adapters. If None , register it globally.

Note

Registering the adapters doesn’t affect objects already created, even if they are children of the registered context. For instance, registering the adapter globally doesn’t affect already existing connections.

Example:

>>> from psycopg.types import TypeInfo
>>> from psycopg.types.shapely import register_shapely
>>> from shapely.geometry import Point

>>> info = TypeInfo.fetch(conn, "geometry")
>>> register_shapely(info, conn)

>>> conn.execute("SELECT pg_typeof(%s)", [Point(1.2, 3.4)]).fetchone()[0]
'geometry'

>>> conn.execute("""
... SELECT ST_GeomFromGeoJSON('{
...     "type":"Point",
...     "coordinates":[-48.23456,20.12345]}')
... """).fetchone()[0]

Notice that, if the geometry adapters are registered on a specific object (a connection or cursor), other connections and cursors will be unaffected:

>>> conn2 = psycopg.connect(CONN_STR)
>>> conn2.execute("""
... SELECT ST_GeomFromGeoJSON('{
...     "type":"Point",
...     "coordinates":[-48.23456,20.12345]}')
... """).fetchone()[0]
'0101000020E61000009279E40F061E48C0F2B0506B9A1F3440'

Transactions management #

Psycopg has a behaviour that may seem surprising compared to psql : by default, any database operation will start a new transaction. As a consequence, changes made by any cursor of the connection will not be visible until Connection.commit() is called, and will be discarded by Connection.rollback() . The following operation on the same connection will start a new transaction.

If a database operation fails, the server will refuse further commands, until a rollback() is called.

If the cursor is closed with a transaction open, no COMMIT command is sent to the server, which will then discard the connection. Certain middleware (such as PgBouncer) will also discard a connection left in transaction state, so, if possible you will want to commit or rollback a connection before finishing working with it.

An example of what will happen, the first time you will use Psycopg (and to be disappointed by it), is likely:

conn = psycopg.connect()

# Creating a cursor doesn't start a transaction or affect the connection
# in any way.
cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
# This function call executes:
# - BEGIN
# - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
# So now a transaction has started.

# If your program spends a long time in this state, the server will keep
# a connection "idle in transaction", which is likely something undesired

cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
# This statement is executed inside the transaction

conn.close()
# No COMMIT was sent: the INSERT was discarded.

There are a few things going wrong here, let’s see how they can be improved.

One obvious problem after the run above is that, firing up psql , you will see no new record in the table data . One way to fix the problem is to call conn.commit() before closing the connection. Thankfully, if you use the connection context , Psycopg will commit the connection at the end of the block (or roll it back if the block is exited with an exception):

The code modified using a connection context will result in the following sequence of database statements:

with psycopg.connect() as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # This function call executes:
    # - BEGIN
    # - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
    # So now a transaction has started.

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
    # This statement is executed inside the transaction

# No exception at the end of the block:
# COMMIT is executed.

This way we don’t have to remember to call neither close() nor commit() and the database operations actually have a persistent effect. The code might still do something you don’t expect: keep a transaction from the first operation to the connection closure. You can have a finer control over the transactions using an autocommit transaction and/or transaction contexts .

Warning

By default even a simple SELECT will start a transaction: in long-running programs, if no further action is taken, the session will remain idle in transaction , an undesirable condition for several reasons (locks are held by the session, tables bloat…). For long lived scripts, either make sure to terminate a transaction as soon as possible or use an autocommit connection.

Hint

If a database operation fails with an error message such as InFailedSqlTransaction: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block , it means that a previous operation failed and the database session is in a state of error. You need to call rollback() if you want to keep on using the same connection.

Autocommit transactions #

The manual commit requirement can be suspended using autocommit , either as connection attribute or as connect() parameter. This may be required to run operations that cannot be executed inside a transaction, such as CREATE DATABASE , VACUUM , CALL on stored procedures using transaction control.

With an autocommit transaction, the above sequence of operation results in:

with psycopg.connect(autocommit=True) as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # This function call now only executes:
    # - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
    # and no transaction starts.

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
    # The result of this statement is persisted immediately by the database

# The connection is closed at the end of the block but, because it is not
# in a transaction state, no COMMIT is executed.

An autocommit transaction behaves more as someone coming from psql would expect. This has a beneficial performance effect, because less queries are sent and less operations are performed by the database. The statements, however, are not executed in an atomic transaction; if you need to execute certain operations inside a transaction, you can achieve that with an autocommit connection too, using an explicit transaction block .

Transaction contexts #

A more transparent way to make sure that transactions are finalised at the right time is to use with Connection.transaction() to create a transaction context. When the context is entered, a transaction is started; when leaving the context the transaction is committed, or it is rolled back if an exception is raised inside the block.

Continuing the example above, if you want to use an autocommit connection but still wrap selected groups of commands inside an atomic transaction, you can use a transaction() context:

with psycopg.connect(autocommit=True) as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # The connection is autocommit, so no BEGIN executed.

    with conn.transaction():
        # BEGIN is executed, a transaction started

        cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
        cur.execute("INSERT INTO times VALUES (now())")
        # These two operation run atomically in the same transaction

    # COMMIT is executed at the end of the block.
    # The connection is in idle state again.

# The connection is closed at the end of the block.

Note that connection blocks can also be used with non-autocommit connections: in this case you still need to pay attention to eventual transactions started automatically. If an operation starts an implicit transaction, a transaction() block will only manage a savepoint sub-transaction , leaving the caller to deal with the main transaction, as explained in Transactions management :

conn = psycopg.connect()

cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
# This function call executes:
# - BEGIN
# - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
# So now a transaction has started.

with conn.transaction():
    # The block starts with a transaction already open, so it will execute
    # - SAVEPOINT

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))

# The block was executing a sub-transaction so on exit it will only run:
# - RELEASE SAVEPOINT
# The transaction is still on.

conn.close()
# No COMMIT was sent: the INSERT was discarded.

If a transaction() block starts when no transaction is active then it will manage a proper transaction. In essence, a transaction context tries to leave a connection in the state it found it, and leaves you to deal with the wider context.

Hint

The interaction between non-autocommit transactions and transaction contexts is probably surprising. Although the non-autocommit default is what’s demanded by the DBAPI, the personal preference of several experienced developers is to:

  • use a connection block: with psycopg.connect(...) as conn ;

  • use an autocommit connection, either passing autocommit=True as connect() parameter or setting the attribute conn.autocommit = True ;

  • use with conn.transaction() blocks to manage transactions only where needed.

Nested transactions #

Transaction blocks can be also nested (internal transaction blocks are implemented using SAVEPOINT ): an exception raised inside an inner block has a chance of being handled and not completely fail outer operations. The following is an example where a series of operations interact with the database: operations are allowed to fail; at the end we also want to store the number of operations successfully processed.

with conn.transaction() as tx1:
    num_ok = 0
    for operation in operations:
        try:
            with conn.transaction() as tx2:
                unreliable_operation(conn, operation)
        except Exception:
            logger.exception(f"{operation} failed")
        else:
            num_ok += 1

    save_number_of_successes(conn, num_ok)

If unreliable_operation() causes an error, including an operation causing a database error, all its changes will be reverted. The exception bubbles up outside the block: in the example it is intercepted by the try so that the loop can complete. The outermost block is unaffected (unless other errors happen there).

You can also write code to explicitly roll back any currently active transaction block, by raising the Rollback exception. The exception "jumps" to the end of a transaction block, rolling back its transaction but allowing the program execution to continue from there. By default the exception rolls back the innermost transaction block, but any current block can be specified as the target. In the following example, a hypothetical CancelCommand may stop the processing and cancel any operation previously performed, but not entirely committed yet.

from psycopg import Rollback

with conn.transaction() as outer_tx:
    for command in commands():
        with conn.transaction() as inner_tx:
            if isinstance(command, CancelCommand):
                raise Rollback(outer_tx)
            process_command(command)

# If `Rollback` is raised, it would propagate only up to this block,
# and the program would continue from here with no exception.
Transaction characteristics #

You can set transaction parameters for the transactions that Psycopg handles. They affect the transactions started implicitly by non-autocommit transactions and the ones started explicitly by Connection.transaction() for both autocommit and non-autocommit transactions. Leaving these parameters as None will use the server’s default behaviour (which is controlled by server settings such as default_transaction_isolation ).

In order to set these parameters you can use the connection attributes isolation_level , read_only , deferrable . For async connections you must use the equivalent set_isolation_level() method and similar. The parameters can only be changed if there isn’t a transaction already active on the connection.

Warning

Applications running at REPEATABLE_READ or SERIALIZABLE isolation level are exposed to serialization failures. In certain concurrent update cases , PostgreSQL will raise an exception looking like:

psycopg2.errors.SerializationFailure: could not serialize access
due to concurrent update

In this case the application must be prepared to repeat the operation that caused the exception.

Two-Phase Commit protocol support #

New in version 3.1.

Psycopg exposes the two-phase commit features available in PostgreSQL implementing the two-phase commit extensions proposed by the DBAPI.

The DBAPI model of two-phase commit is inspired by the XA specification , according to which transaction IDs are formed from three components:

  • a format ID (non-negative 32 bit integer)

  • a global transaction ID (string not longer than 64 bytes)

  • a branch qualifier (string not longer than 64 bytes)

For a particular global transaction, the first two components will be the same for all the resources. Every resource will be assigned a different branch qualifier.

According to the DBAPI specification, a transaction ID is created using the Connection.xid() method. Once you have a transaction id, a distributed transaction can be started with Connection.tpc_begin() , prepared using tpc_prepare() and completed using tpc_commit() or tpc_rollback() . Transaction IDs can also be retrieved from the database using tpc_recover() and completed using the above tpc_commit() and tpc_rollback() .

PostgreSQL doesn’t follow the XA standard though, and the ID for a PostgreSQL prepared transaction can be any string up to 200 characters long. Psycopg’s Xid objects can represent both XA-style transactions IDs (such as the ones created by the xid() method) and PostgreSQL transaction IDs identified by an unparsed string.

The format in which the Xids are converted into strings passed to the database is the same employed by the PostgreSQL JDBC driver : this should allow interoperation between tools written in Python and in Java. For example a recovery tool written in Python would be able to recognize the components of transactions produced by a Java program.

For further details see the documentation for the Two-Phase Commit support methods .

Using COPY TO and COPY FROM #

Psycopg allows to operate with PostgreSQL COPY protocol . COPY is one of the most efficient ways to load data into the database (and to modify it, with some SQL creativity).

Copy is supported using the Cursor.copy() method, passing it a query of the form COPY ... FROM STDIN or COPY ... TO STDOUT , and managing the resulting Copy object in a with block:

with cursor.copy("COPY table_name (col1, col2) FROM STDIN") as copy:
    # pass data to the 'copy' object using write()/write_row()

You can compose a COPY statement dynamically by using objects from the psycopg.sql module:

with cursor.copy(
    sql.SQL("COPY {} TO STDOUT").format(sql.Identifier("table_name"))
) as copy:
    # read data from the 'copy' object using read()/read_row()

Changed in version 3.1: You can also pass parameters to copy() , like in execute() :

with cur.copy("COPY (SELECT * FROM table_name LIMIT %s) TO STDOUT", (3,)) as copy:
    # expect no more than three records

The connection is subject to the usual transaction behaviour, so, unless the connection is in autocommit, at the end of the COPY operation you will still have to commit the pending changes and you can still roll them back. See Transactions management for details.

Writing data row-by-row #

Using a copy operation you can load data into the database from any Python iterable (a list of tuples, or any iterable of sequences): the Python values are adapted as they would be in normal querying. To perform such operation use a COPY ... FROM STDIN with Cursor.copy() and use write_row() on the resulting object in a with block. On exiting the block the operation will be concluded:

records = [(10, 20, "hello"), (40, None, "world")]

with cursor.copy("COPY sample (col1, col2, col3) FROM STDIN") as copy:
    for record in records:
        copy.write_row(record)

If an exception is raised inside the block, the operation is interrupted and the records inserted so far are discarded.

In order to read or write from Copy row-by-row you must not specify COPY options such as FORMAT CSV , DELIMITER , NULL : please leave these details alone, thank you :)

Reading data row-by-row #

You can also do the opposite, reading rows out of a COPY ... TO STDOUT operation, by iterating on rows() . However this is not something you may want to do normally: usually the normal query process will be easier to use.

PostgreSQL, currently, doesn’t give complete type information on COPY TO , so the rows returned will have unparsed data, as strings or bytes, according to the format.

with cur.copy("COPY (VALUES (10::int, current_date)) TO STDOUT") as copy:
    for row in copy.rows():
        print(row)  # return unparsed data: ('10', '2046-12-24')

You can improve the results by using set_types() before reading, but you have to specify them yourself.

with cur.copy("COPY (VALUES (10::int, current_date)) TO STDOUT") as copy:
    copy.set_types(["int4", "date"])
    for row in copy.rows():
        print(row)  # (10, datetime.date(2046, 12, 24))
Copying block-by-block #

If data is already formatted in a way suitable for copy (for instance because it is coming from a file resulting from a previous COPY TO operation) it can be loaded into the database using Copy.write() instead.

with open("data", "r") as f:
    with cursor.copy("COPY data FROM STDIN") as copy:
        while data := f.read(BLOCK_SIZE):
            copy.write(data)

In this case you can use any COPY option and format, as long as the input data is compatible with what the operation in copy() expects. Data can be passed as str , if the copy is in FORMAT TEXT , or as bytes , which works with both FORMAT TEXT and FORMAT BINARY .

In order to produce data in COPY format you can use a COPY ... TO STDOUT statement and iterate over the resulting Copy object, which will produce a stream of bytes objects:

with open("data.out", "wb") as f:
    with cursor.copy("COPY table_name TO STDOUT") as copy:
        for data in copy:
            f.write(data)
Binary copy #

Binary copy is supported by specifying FORMAT BINARY in the COPY statement. In order to import binary data using write_row() , all the types passed to the database must have a binary dumper registered; this is not necessary if the data is copied block-by-block using write() .

Warning

PostgreSQL is particularly finicky when loading data in binary mode and will apply no cast rules . This means, for example, that passing the value 100 to an integer column will fail , because Psycopg will pass it as a smallint value, and the server will reject it because its size doesn’t match what expected.

You can work around the problem using the set_types() method of the Copy object and specifying carefully the types to load.

See also

See Binary parameters and results for further info about binary querying.

Asynchronous copy support #

Asynchronous operations are supported using the same patterns as above, using the objects obtained by an AsyncConnection . For instance, if f is an object supporting an asynchronous read() method returning COPY data, a fully-async copy operation could be:

async with cursor.copy("COPY data FROM STDIN") as copy:
    while data := await f.read():
        await copy.write(data)

The AsyncCopy object documentation describes the signature of the asynchronous methods and the differences from its sync Copy counterpart.

See also

See Asynchronous operations for further info about using async objects.

Example: copying a table across servers #

In order to copy a table, or a portion of a table, across servers, you can use two COPY operations on two different connections, reading from the first and writing to the second.

with psycopg.connect(dsn_src) as conn1, psycopg.connect(dsn_tgt) as conn2:
    with conn1.cursor().copy("COPY src TO STDOUT (FORMAT BINARY)") as copy1:
        with conn2.cursor().copy("COPY tgt FROM STDIN (FORMAT BINARY)") as copy2:
            for data in copy1:
                copy2.write(data)

Using FORMAT BINARY usually gives a performance boost, but it only works if the source and target schema are perfectly identical . If the tables are only compatible (for example, if you are copying an integer field into a bigint destination field) you should omit the BINARY option and perform a text-based copy. See Binary copy for details.

The same pattern can be adapted to use async objects in order to perform an async copy .

Differences from psycopg2 #

Psycopg 3 uses the common DBAPI structure of many other database adapters and tries to behave as close as possible to psycopg2 . There are however a few differences to be aware of.

Tip

Most of the times, the workarounds suggested here will work with both Psycopg 2 and 3, which could be useful if you are porting a program or writing a program that should work with both Psycopg 2 and 3.

Server-side binding #

Psycopg 3 sends the query and the parameters to the server separately, instead of merging them on the client side. Server-side binding works for normal SELECT and data manipulation statements ( INSERT , UPDATE , DELETE ), but it doesn’t work with many other statements. For instance, it doesn’t work with SET or with NOTIFY :

>>> conn.execute("SET TimeZone TO %s", ["UTC"])
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "$1"
LINE 1: SET TimeZone TO $1
                        ^

>>> conn.execute("NOTIFY %s, %s", ["chan", 42])
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "$1"
LINE 1: NOTIFY $1, $2
               ^

and with any data definition statement:

>>> conn.execute("CREATE TABLE foo (id int DEFAULT %s)", [42])
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.UndefinedParameter: there is no parameter $1
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE foo (id int DEFAULT $1)
                                         ^

Sometimes, PostgreSQL offers an alternative: for instance the set_config() function can be used instead of the SET statement, the pg_notify() function can be used instead of NOTIFY :

>>> conn.execute("SELECT set_config('TimeZone', %s, false)", ["UTC"])

>>> conn.execute("SELECT pg_notify(%s, %s)", ["chan", "42"])

If this is not possible, you must merge the query and the parameter on the client side. You can do so using the psycopg.sql objects:

>>> from psycopg import sql

>>> cur.execute(sql.SQL("CREATE TABLE foo (id int DEFAULT {})").format(42))

or creating a client-side binding cursor such as ClientCursor :

>>> cur = ClientCursor(conn)
>>> cur.execute("CREATE TABLE foo (id int DEFAULT %s)", [42])

If you need ClientCursor often, you can set the Connection.cursor_factory to have them created by default by Connection.cursor() . This way, Psycopg 3 will behave largely the same way of Psycopg 2.

Note that, both server-side and client-side, you can only specify values as parameters (i.e. the strings that go in single quotes ). If you need to parametrize different parts of a statement (such as a table name), you must use the psycopg.sql module:

>>> from psycopg import sql

# This will quote the user and the password using the right quotes
# e.g.: ALTER USER "foo" SET PASSWORD 'bar'
>>> conn.execute(
...     sql.SQL("ALTER USER {} SET PASSWORD {}")
...     .format(sql.Identifier(username), password))
Multiple statements in the same query #

As a consequence of using server-side bindings , when parameters are used, it is not possible to execute several statements in the same execute() call, separating them by semicolon:

>>> conn.execute(
...     "INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s); INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)",
...     (10, 20))
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.SyntaxError: cannot insert multiple commands into a prepared statement

One obvious way to work around the problem is to use several execute() calls.

There is no such limitation if no parameters are used . As a consequence, you can compose a multiple query on the client side and run them all in the same execute() call, using the psycopg.sql objects:

>>> from psycopg import sql
>>> conn.execute(
...     sql.SQL("INSERT INTO foo VALUES ({}); INSERT INTO foo values ({})"
...     .format(10, 20))

or a client-side binding cursor :

>>> cur = psycopg.ClientCursor(conn)
>>> cur.execute(
...     "INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s); INSERT INTO foo VALUES (%s)",
...     (10, 20))

Warning

If a statements must be executed outside a transaction (such as CREATE DATABASE ), it cannot be executed in batch with other statements, even if the connection is in autocommit mode:

>>> conn.autocommit = True
>>> conn.execute("CREATE DATABASE foo; SELECT 1")
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.ActiveSqlTransaction: CREATE DATABASE cannot run inside a transaction block

This happens because PostgreSQL itself will wrap multiple statements in a transaction. Note that your will experience a different behaviour in psql ( psql will split the queries on semicolons and send them to the server separately).

This is not new in Psycopg 3: the same limitation is present in psycopg2 too.

Multiple results returned from multiple statements #

If more than one statement returning results is executed in psycopg2, only the result of the last statement is returned:

>>> cur_pg2.execute("SELECT 1; SELECT 2")
>>> cur_pg2.fetchone()
(2,)

In Psycopg 3 instead, all the results are available. After running the query, the first result will be readily available in the cursor and can be consumed using the usual fetch*() methods. In order to access the following results, you can use the Cursor.nextset() method:

>>> cur_pg3.execute("SELECT 1; SELECT 2")
>>> cur_pg3.fetchone()
(1,)

>>> cur_pg3.nextset()
True
>>> cur_pg3.fetchone()
(2,)

>>> cur_pg3.nextset()
None  # no more results

Remember though that you cannot use server-side bindings to execute more than one statement in the same query .

Different cast rules #

In rare cases, especially around variadic functions, PostgreSQL might fail to find a function candidate for the given data types:

>>> conn.execute("SELECT json_build_array(%s, %s)", ["foo", "bar"])
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.IndeterminateDatatype: could not determine data type of parameter $1

This can be worked around specifying the argument types explicitly via a cast:

>>> conn.execute("SELECT json_build_array(%s::text, %s::text)", ["foo", "bar"])
You cannot use IN %s with a tuple #

IN cannot be used with a tuple as single parameter, as was possible with psycopg2 :

>>> conn.execute("SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id IN %s", [(10,20,30)])
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
psycopg.errors.SyntaxError: syntax error at or near "$1"
LINE 1: SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id IN $1
                                      ^

What you can do is to use the = ANY() construct and pass the candidate values as a list instead of a tuple, which will be adapted to a PostgreSQL array:

>>> conn.execute("SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id = ANY(%s)", [[10,20,30]])

Note that ANY() can be used with psycopg2 too, and has the advantage of accepting an empty list of values too as argument, which is not supported by the IN operator instead.

Different adaptation system #

The adaptation system has been completely rewritten, in order to address server-side parameters adaptation, but also to consider performance, flexibility, ease of customization.

The default behaviour with builtin data should be what you would expect . If you have customised the way to adapt data, or if you are managing your own extension types, you should look at the new adaptation system .

See also

Copy is no longer file-based #

psycopg2 exposes a few copy methods to interact with PostgreSQL COPY . Their file-based interface doesn’t make it easy to load dynamically-generated data into a database.

There is now a single copy() method, which is similar to psycopg2 copy_expert() in accepting a free-form COPY command and returns an object to read/write data, block-wise or record-wise. The different usage pattern also enables COPY to be used in async interactions.

See also

See Using COPY TO and COPY FROM for the details.

with connection #

In psycopg2 , using the syntax with connection , only the transaction is closed, not the connection. This behaviour is surprising for people used to several other Python classes wrapping resources, such as files.

In Psycopg 3, using with connection will close the connection at the end of the with block, making handling the connection resources more familiar.

In order to manage transactions as blocks you can use the Connection.transaction() method, which allows for finer control, for instance to use nested transactions.

See also

See Transaction contexts for details.

callproc() is gone #

cursor.callproc() is not implemented. The method has a simplistic semantic which doesn’t account for PostgreSQL positional parameters, procedures, set-returning functions… Use a normal execute() with SELECT function_name(...) or CALL procedure_name(...) instead.

client_encoding is gone #

Psycopg automatically uses the database client encoding to decode data to Unicode strings. Use ConnectionInfo.encoding if you need to read the encoding. You can select an encoding at connection time using the client_encoding connection parameter and you can change the encoding of a connection by running a SET client_encoding statement… But why would you?

No default infinity dates handling #

PostgreSQL can represent a much wider range of dates and timestamps than Python. While Python dates are limited to the years between 1 and 9999 (represented by constants such as datetime.date.min and max ), PostgreSQL dates extend to BC dates and past the year 10K. Furthermore PostgreSQL can also represent symbolic dates "infinity", in both directions.

In psycopg2, by default, infinity dates and timestamps map to ‘date.max’ and similar constants. This has the problem of creating a non-bijective mapping (two Postgres dates, infinity and 9999-12-31, both map to the same Python date). There is also the perversity that valid Postgres dates, greater than Python date.max but arguably lesser than infinity, will still overflow.

In Psycopg 3, every date greater than year 9999 will overflow, including infinity. If you would like to customize this mapping (for instance flattening every date past Y10K on date.max ) you can subclass and adapt the appropriate loaders: take a look at this example to see how.

What’s new in Psycopg 3 #

More advanced topics #

Once you have familiarised yourself with the Psycopg basic operations , you can take a look at the chapter of this section for more advanced usages.

Asynchronous operations #

Psycopg Connection and Cursor have counterparts AsyncConnection and AsyncCursor supporting an asyncio interface.

The design of the asynchronous objects is pretty much the same of the sync ones: in order to use them you will only have to scatter the await keyword here and there.

async with await psycopg.AsyncConnection.connect(
        "dbname=test user=postgres") as aconn:
    async with aconn.cursor() as acur:
        await acur.execute(
            "INSERT INTO test (num, data) VALUES (%s, %s)",
            (100, "abc'def"))
        await acur.execute("SELECT * FROM test")
        await acur.fetchone()
        # will return (1, 100, "abc'def")
        async for record in acur:
            print(record)

Changed in version 3.1: AsyncConnection.connect() performs DNS name resolution in a non-blocking way.

Warning

Before version 3.1, AsyncConnection.connect() may still block on DNS name resolution. To avoid that you should set the hostaddr connection parameter , or use the resolve_hostaddr_async() to do it automatically.

Warning

On Windows, Psycopg is not compatible with the default ProactorEventLoop . Please use a different loop, for instance the SelectorEventLoop .

For instance, you can use, early in your program:

asyncio.set_event_loop_policy(
    asyncio.WindowsSelectorEventLoopPolicy()
)
with async connections #

As seen in the basic usage , connections and cursors can act as context managers, so you can run:

with psycopg.connect("dbname=test user=postgres") as conn:
    with conn.cursor() as cur:
        cur.execute(...)
    # the cursor is closed upon leaving the context
# the transaction is committed, the connection closed

For asynchronous connections it’s almost what you’d expect, but not quite. Please note that connect() and cursor() don’t return a context : they are both factory methods which return an object which can be used as a context . That’s because there are several use cases where it’s useful to handle the objects manually and only close() them when required.

As a consequence you cannot use async with connect() : you have to do it in two steps instead, as in

aconn = await psycopg.AsyncConnection.connect()
async with aconn:
    async with aconn.cursor() as cur:
        await cur.execute(...)

which can be condensed into async with await :

async with await psycopg.AsyncConnection.connect() as aconn:
    async with aconn.cursor() as cur:
        await cur.execute(...)

…but no less than that: you still need to do the double async thing.

Note that the AsyncConnection.cursor() function is not an async function (it never performs I/O), so you don’t need an await on it; as a consequence you can use the normal async with context manager.

Interrupting async operations using Ctrl-C #

If a long running operation is interrupted by a Ctrl-C on a normal connection running in the main thread, the operation will be cancelled and the connection will be put in error state, from which can be recovered with a normal rollback() .

If the query is running in an async connection, a Ctrl-C will be likely intercepted by the async loop and interrupt the whole program. In order to emulate what normally happens with blocking connections, you can use asyncio’s add_signal_handler() , to call Connection.cancel() :

import asyncio
import signal

async with await psycopg.AsyncConnection.connect() as conn:
    loop.add_signal_handler(signal.SIGINT, conn.cancel)
    ...
Server messages #

PostgreSQL can send, together with the query results, informative messages about the operation just performed, such as warnings or debug information. Notices may be raised even if the operations are successful and don’t indicate an error. You are probably familiar with some of them, because they are reported by psql :

$ psql
=# ROLLBACK;
WARNING:  there is no transaction in progress
ROLLBACK

Messages can be also sent by the PL/pgSQL ‘RAISE’ statement (at a level lower than EXCEPTION, otherwise the appropriate DatabaseError will be raised). The level of the messages received can be controlled using the client_min_messages setting.

By default, the messages received are ignored. If you want to process them on the client you can use the Connection.add_notice_handler() function to register a function that will be invoked whenever a message is received. The message is passed to the callback as a Diagnostic instance, containing all the information passed by the server, such as the message text and the severity. The object is the same found on the diag attribute of the errors raised by the server:

>>> import psycopg

>>> def log_notice(diag):
...     print(f"The server says: {diag.severity} - {diag.message_primary}")

>>> conn = psycopg.connect(autocommit=True)
>>> conn.add_notice_handler(log_notice)

>>> cur = conn.execute("ROLLBACK")
The server says: WARNING - there is no transaction in progress
>>> print(cur.statusmessage)
ROLLBACK

Warning

The Diagnostic object received by the callback should not be used after the callback function terminates, because its data is deallocated after the callbacks have been processed. If you need to use the information later please extract the attributes requested and forward them instead of forwarding the whole Diagnostic object.

Asynchronous notifications #

Psycopg allows asynchronous interaction with other database sessions using the facilities offered by PostgreSQL commands LISTEN and NOTIFY . Please refer to the PostgreSQL documentation for examples about how to use this form of communication.

Because of the way sessions interact with notifications (see NOTIFY documentation), you should keep the connection in autocommit mode if you wish to receive or send notifications in a timely manner.

Notifications are received as instances of Notify . If you are reserving a connection only to receive notifications, the simplest way is to consume the Connection.notifies generator. The generator can be stopped using close() .

Note

You don’t need an AsyncConnection to handle notifications: a normal blocking Connection is perfectly valid.

The following example will print notifications and stop when one containing the "stop" message is received.

import psycopg
conn = psycopg.connect("", autocommit=True)
conn.execute("LISTEN mychan")
gen = conn.notifies()
for notify in gen:
    print(notify)
    if notify.payload == "stop":
        gen.close()
print("there, I stopped")

If you run some NOTIFY in a psql session:

=# NOTIFY mychan, 'hello';
NOTIFY
=# NOTIFY mychan, 'hey';
NOTIFY
=# NOTIFY mychan, 'stop';
NOTIFY

You may get output from the Python process such as:

Notify(channel='mychan', payload='hello', pid=961823)
Notify(channel='mychan', payload='hey', pid=961823)
Notify(channel='mychan', payload='stop', pid=961823)
there, I stopped

Alternatively, you can use add_notify_handler() to register a callback function, which will be invoked whenever a notification is received, during the normal query processing; you will be then able to use the connection normally. Please note that in this case notifications will not be received immediately, but only during a connection operation, such as a query.

conn.add_notify_handler(lambda n: print(f"got this: {n}"))

# meanwhile in psql...
# =# NOTIFY mychan, 'hey';
# NOTIFY

print(conn.execute("SELECT 1").fetchone())
# got this: Notify(channel='mychan', payload='hey', pid=961823)
# (1,)
Detecting disconnections #

Sometimes it is useful to detect immediately when the connection with the database is lost. One brutal way to do so is to poll a connection in a loop running an endless stream of SELECT 1 Don’t do so: polling is so out of fashion. Besides, it is inefficient (unless what you really want is a client-server generator of ones), it generates useless traffic and will only detect a disconnection with an average delay of half the polling time.

A more efficient and timely way to detect a server disconnection is to create an additional connection and wait for a notification from the OS that this connection has something to say: only then you can run some checks. You can dedicate a thread (or an asyncio task) to wait on this connection: such thread will perform no activity until awaken by the OS.

In a normal (non asyncio) program you can use the selectors module. Because the Connection implements a fileno() method you can just register it as a file-like object. You can run such code in a dedicated thread (and using a dedicated connection) if the rest of the program happens to have something else to do too.

import selectors

sel = selectors.DefaultSelector()
sel.register(conn, selectors.EVENT_READ)
while True:
    if not sel.select(timeout=60.0):
        continue  # No FD activity detected in one minute

    # Activity detected. Is the connection still ok?
    try:
        conn.execute("SELECT 1")
    except psycopg.OperationalError:
        # You were disconnected: do something useful such as panicking
        logger.error("we lost our database!")
        sys.exit(1)

In an asyncio program you can dedicate a Task instead and do something similar using add_reader :

import asyncio

ev = asyncio.Event()
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.add_reader(conn.fileno(), ev.set)

while True:
    try:
        await asyncio.wait_for(ev.wait(), 60.0)
    except asyncio.TimeoutError:
        continue  # No FD activity detected in one minute

    # Activity detected. Is the connection still ok?
    try:
        await conn.execute("SELECT 1")
    except psycopg.OperationalError:
        # Guess what happened
        ...

Static Typing #

Psycopg source code is annotated according to PEP 0484 type hints and is checked using the current version of Mypy in --strict mode.

If your application is checked using Mypy too you can make use of Psycopg types to validate the correct use of Psycopg objects and of the data returned by the database.

Generic types #

Psycopg Connection and Cursor objects are Generic objects and support a Row parameter which is the type of the records returned.

By default methods such as Cursor.fetchall() return normal tuples of unknown size and content. As such, the connect() function returns an object of type psycopg.Connection[Tuple[Any, ...]] and Connection.cursor() returns an object of type psycopg.Cursor[Tuple[Any, ...]] . If you are writing generic plumbing code it might be practical to use annotations such as Connection[Any] and Cursor[Any] .

conn = psycopg.connect() # type is psycopg.Connection[Tuple[Any, ...]]

cur = conn.cursor()      # type is psycopg.Cursor[Tuple[Any, ...]]

rec = cur.fetchone()     # type is Optional[Tuple[Any, ...]]

recs = cur.fetchall()    # type is List[Tuple[Any, ...]]
Type of rows returned #

If you want to use connections and cursors returning your data as different types, for instance as dictionaries, you can use the row_factory argument of the connect() and the cursor() method, which will control what type of record is returned by the fetch methods of the cursors and annotate the returned objects accordingly. See Row factories for more details.

dconn = psycopg.connect(row_factory=dict_row)
# dconn type is psycopg.Connection[Dict[str, Any]]

dcur = conn.cursor(row_factory=dict_row)
dcur = dconn.cursor()
# dcur type is psycopg.Cursor[Dict[str, Any]] in both cases

drec = dcur.fetchone()
# drec type is Optional[Dict[str, Any]]
Example: returning records as Pydantic models #

Using Pydantic it is possible to enforce static typing at runtime. Using a Pydantic model factory the code can be checked statically using Mypy and querying the database will raise an exception if the rows returned is not compatible with the model.

The following example can be checked with mypy --strict without reporting any issue. Pydantic will also raise a runtime error in case the Person is used with a query that returns incompatible data.

from datetime import date
from typing import Optional

import psycopg
from psycopg.rows import class_row
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Person(BaseModel):
    id: int
    first_name: str
    last_name: str
    dob: Optional[date]

def fetch_person(id: int) -> Person:
    with psycopg.connect() as conn:
        with conn.cursor(row_factory=class_row(Person)) as cur:
            cur.execute(
                """
                SELECT id, first_name, last_name, dob
                FROM (VALUES
                    (1, 'John', 'Doe', '2000-01-01'::date),
                    (2, 'Jane', 'White', NULL)
                ) AS data (id, first_name, last_name, dob)
                WHERE id = %(id)s;
                """,
                {"id": id},
            )
            obj = cur.fetchone()

            # reveal_type(obj) would return 'Optional[Person]' here

            if not obj:
                raise KeyError(f"person {id} not found")

            # reveal_type(obj) would return 'Person' here

            return obj

for id in [1, 2]:
    p = fetch_person(id)
    if p.dob:
        print(f"{p.first_name} was born in {p.dob.year}")
    else:
        print(f"Who knows when {p.first_name} was born")
Checking literal strings in queries #

The execute() method and similar should only receive a literal string as input, according to PEP 675 . This means that the query should come from a literal string in your code, not from an arbitrary string expression.

For instance, passing an argument to the query should be done via the second argument to execute() , not by string composition:

def get_record(conn: psycopg.Connection[Any], id: int) -> Any:
    cur = conn.execute("SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE id = %s" % id)  # BAD!
    return cur.fetchone()

# the function should be implemented as:

def get_record(conn: psycopg.Connection[Any], id: int) -> Any:
    cur = conn.execute("select * FROM my_table WHERE id = %s", (id,))
    return cur.fetchone()

If you are composing a query dynamically you should use the sql.SQL object and similar to escape safely table and field names. The parameter of the SQL() object should be a literal string:

def count_records(conn: psycopg.Connection[Any], table: str) -> int:
    query = "SELECT count(*) FROM %s" % table  # BAD!
    return conn.execute(query).fetchone()[0]

# the function should be implemented as:

def count_records(conn: psycopg.Connection[Any], table: str) -> int:
    query = sql.SQL("SELECT count(*) FROM {}").format(sql.Identifier(table))
    return conn.execute(query).fetchone()[0]

At the time of writing, no Python static analyzer implements this check ( mypy doesn’t implement it , Pyre does, but doesn’t work with psycopg yet ). Once the type checkers support will be complete, the above bad statements should be reported as errors.

Row factories #

Cursor’s fetch* methods, by default, return the records received from the database as tuples. This can be changed to better suit the needs of the programmer by using custom row factories .

The module psycopg.rows exposes several row factories ready to be used. For instance, if you want to return your records as dictionaries, you can use dict_row :

>>> from psycopg.rows import dict_row

>>> conn = psycopg.connect(DSN, row_factory=dict_row)

>>> conn.execute("select 'John Doe' as name, 33 as age").fetchone()
{'name': 'John Doe', 'age': 33}

The row_factory parameter is supported by the connect() method and the cursor() method. Later usage of row_factory overrides a previous one. It is also possible to change the Connection.row_factory or Cursor.row_factory attributes to change what they return:

>>> cur = conn.cursor(row_factory=dict_row)
>>> cur.execute("select 'John Doe' as name, 33 as age").fetchone()
{'name': 'John Doe', 'age': 33}

>>> from psycopg.rows import namedtuple_row
>>> cur.row_factory = namedtuple_row
>>> cur.execute("select 'John Doe' as name, 33 as age").fetchone()
Row(name='John Doe', age=33)

If you want to return objects of your choice you can use a row factory generator , for instance class_row or args_row , or you can write your own row factory :

>>> from dataclasses import dataclass

>>> @dataclass
... class Person:
...     name: str
...     age: int
...     weight: Optional[int] = None

>>> from psycopg.rows import class_row
>>> cur = conn.cursor(row_factory=class_row(Person))
>>> cur.execute("select 'John Doe' as name, 33 as age").fetchone()
Person(name='John Doe', age=33, weight=None)
Creating new row factories #

A row factory is a callable that accepts a Cursor object and returns another callable, a row maker , which takes raw data (as a sequence of values) and returns the desired object.

The role of the row factory is to inspect a query result (it is called after a query is executed and properties such as description and pgresult are available on the cursor) and to prepare a callable which is efficient to call repeatedly (because, for instance, the names of the columns are extracted, sanitised, and stored in local variables).

Formally, these objects are represented by the RowFactory and RowMaker protocols.

RowFactory objects can be implemented as a class, for instance:

from typing import Any, Sequence
from psycopg import Cursor

class DictRowFactory:
    def __init__(self, cursor: Cursor[Any]):
        self.fields = [c.name for c in cursor.description]

    def __call__(self, values: Sequence[Any]) -> dict[str, Any]:
        return dict(zip(self.fields, values))

or as a plain function:

def dict_row_factory(cursor: Cursor[Any]) -> RowMaker[dict[str, Any]]:
    fields = [c.name for c in cursor.description]

    def make_row(values: Sequence[Any]) -> dict[str, Any]:
        return dict(zip(fields, values))

    return make_row

These can then be used by specifying a row_factory argument in Connection.connect() , Connection.cursor() , or by setting the Connection.row_factory attribute.

conn = psycopg.connect(row_factory=DictRowFactory)
cur = conn.execute("SELECT first_name, last_name, age FROM persons")
person = cur.fetchone()
print(f"{person['first_name']} {person['last_name']}")

Connection pools #

A connection pool is an object managing a set of connections and allowing their use in functions needing one. Because the time to establish a new connection can be relatively long, keeping connections open can reduce latency.

This page explains a few basic concepts of Psycopg connection pool’s behaviour. Please refer to the ConnectionPool object API for details about the pool operations.

Note

The connection pool objects are distributed in a package separate from the main psycopg package: use pip install "psycopg[pool]" or pip install psycopg_pool to make the psycopg_pool package available. See Installing the connection pool .

Pool life cycle #

A simple way to use the pool is to create a single instance of it, as a global object, and to use this object in the rest of the program, allowing other functions, modules, threads to use it:

# module db.py in your program
from psycopg_pool import ConnectionPool

pool = ConnectionPool(conninfo, **kwargs)
# the pool starts connecting immediately.

# in another module
from .db import pool

def my_function():
    with pool.connection() as conn:
        conn.execute(...)

Ideally you may want to call close() when the use of the pool is finished. Failing to call close() at the end of the program is not terribly bad: probably it will just result in some warnings printed on stderr. However, if you think that it’s sloppy, you could use the atexit module to have close() called at the end of the program.

If you want to avoid starting to connect to the database at import time, and want to wait for the application to be ready, you can create the pool using open=False , and call the open() and close() methods when the conditions are right. Certain frameworks provide callbacks triggered when the program is started and stopped (for instance FastAPI startup/shutdown events ): they are perfect to initiate and terminate the pool operations:

pool = ConnectionPool(conninfo, open=False, **kwargs)

@app.on_event("startup")
def open_pool():
    pool.open()

@app.on_event("shutdown")
def close_pool():
    pool.close()

Creating a single pool as a global variable is not the mandatory use: your program can create more than one pool, which might be useful to connect to more than one database, or to provide different types of connections, for instance to provide separate read/write and read-only connections. The pool also acts as a context manager and is open and closed, if necessary, on entering and exiting the context block:

from psycopg_pool import ConnectionPool

with ConnectionPool(conninfo, **kwargs) as pool:
    run_app(pool)

# the pool is now closed

When the pool is open, the pool’s background workers start creating the requested min_size connections, while the constructor (or the open() method) returns immediately. This allows the program some leeway to start before the target database is up and running. However, if your application is misconfigured, or the network is down, it means that the program will be able to start, but the threads requesting a connection will fail with a PoolTimeout only after the timeout on connection() is expired. If this behaviour is not desirable (and you prefer your program to crash hard and fast, if the surrounding conditions are not right, because something else will respawn it) you should call the wait() method after creating the pool, or call open(wait=True) : these methods will block until the pool is full, or will raise a PoolTimeout exception if the pool isn’t ready within the allocated time.

Connections life cycle #

The pool background workers create connections according to the parameters conninfo , kwargs , and connection_class passed to ConnectionPool constructor, invoking something like connection_class ( conninfo , ** kwargs ) . Once a connection is created it is also passed to the configure() callback, if provided, after which it is put in the pool (or passed to a client requesting it, if someone is already knocking at the door).

If a connection expires (it passes max_lifetime ), or is returned to the pool in broken state, or is found closed by check() ), then the pool will dispose of it and will start a new connection attempt in the background.

Using connections from the pool #

The pool can be used to request connections from multiple threads or concurrent tasks - it is hardly useful otherwise! If more connections than the ones available in the pool are requested, the requesting threads are queued and are served a connection as soon as one is available, either because another client has finished using it or because the pool is allowed to grow (when max_size > min_size ) and a new connection is ready.

The main way to use the pool is to obtain a connection using the connection() context, which returns a Connection or subclass:

with my_pool.connection() as conn:
    conn.execute("what you want")

The connection() context behaves like the Connection object context: at the end of the block, if there is a transaction open, it will be committed, or rolled back if the context is exited with as exception.

At the end of the block the connection is returned to the pool and shouldn’t be used anymore by the code which obtained it. If a reset() function is specified in the pool constructor, it is called on the connection before returning it to the pool. Note that the reset() function is called in a worker thread, so that the thread which used the connection can keep its execution without being slowed down by it.

Pool connection and sizing #

A pool can have a fixed size (specifying no max_size or max_size = min_size ) or a dynamic size (when max_size > min_size ). In both cases, as soon as the pool is created, it will try to acquire min_size connections in the background.

If an attempt to create a connection fails, a new attempt will be made soon after, using an exponential backoff to increase the time between attempts, until a maximum of reconnect_timeout is reached. When that happens, the pool will call the reconnect_failed() function, if provided to the pool, and just start a new connection attempt. You can use this function either to send alerts or to interrupt the program and allow the rest of your infrastructure to restart it.

If more than min_size connections are requested concurrently, new ones are created, up to max_size . Note that the connections are always created by the background workers, not by the thread asking for the connection: if a client requests a new connection, and a previous client terminates its job before the new connection is ready, the waiting client will be served the existing connection. This is especially useful in scenarios where the time to establish a connection dominates the time for which the connection is used (see this analysis , for instance).

If a pool grows above min_size , but its usage decreases afterwards, a number of connections are eventually closed: one every time a connection is unused after the max_idle time specified in the pool constructor.

What’s the right size for the pool? #

Big question. Who knows. However, probably not as large as you imagine. Please take a look at this analysis for some ideas.

Something useful you can do is probably to use the get_stats() method and monitor the behaviour of your program to tune the configuration parameters. The size of the pool can also be changed at runtime using the resize() method.

Null connection pools #

New in version 3.1.

Sometimes you may want leave the choice of using or not using a connection pool as a configuration parameter of your application. For instance, you might want to use a pool if you are deploying a "large instance" of your application and can dedicate it a handful of connections; conversely you might not want to use it if you deploy the application in several instances, behind a load balancer, and/or using an external connection pool process such as PgBouncer.

Switching between using or not using a pool requires some code change, because the ConnectionPool API is different from the normal connect() function and because the pool can perform additional connection configuration (in the configure parameter) that, if the pool is removed, should be performed in some different code path of your application.

The psycopg_pool 3.1 package introduces the NullConnectionPool class. This class has the same interface, and largely the same behaviour, of the ConnectionPool , but doesn’t create any connection beforehand. When a connection is returned, unless there are other clients already waiting, it is closed immediately and not kept in the pool state.

A null pool is not only a configuration convenience, but can also be used to regulate the access to the server by a client program. If max_size is set to a value greater than 0, the pool will make sure that no more than max_size connections are created at any given time. If more clients ask for further connections, they will be queued and served a connection as soon as a previous client has finished using it, like for the basic pool. Other mechanisms to throttle client requests (such as timeout or max_waiting ) are respected too.

Note

Queued clients will be handed an already established connection, as soon as a previous client has finished using it (and after the pool has returned it to idle state and called reset() on it, if necessary).

Because normally (i.e. unless queued) every client will be served a new connection, the time to obtain the connection is paid by the waiting client; background workers are not normally involved in obtaining new connections.

Connection quality #

The state of the connection is verified when a connection is returned to the pool: if a connection is broken during its usage it will be discarded on return and a new connection will be created.

Warning

The health of the connection is not checked when the pool gives it to a client.

Why not? Because doing so would require an extra network roundtrip: we want to save you from its latency. Before getting too angry about it, just think that the connection can be lost any moment while your program is using it. As your program should already be able to cope with a loss of a connection during its process, it should be able to tolerate to be served a broken connection: unpleasant but not the end of the world.

Warning

The health of the connection is not checked when the connection is in the pool.

Does the pool keep a watchful eye on the quality of the connections inside it? No, it doesn’t. Why not? Because you will do it for us! Your program is only a big ruse to make sure the connections are still alive…

Not (entirely) trolling: if you are using a connection pool, we assume that you are using and returning connections at a good pace. If the pool had to check for the quality of a broken connection before your program notices it, it should be polling each connection even faster than your program uses them. Your database server wouldn’t be amused…

Can you do something better than that? Of course you can, there is always a better way than polling. You can use the same recipe of Detecting disconnections , reserving a connection and using a thread to monitor for any activity happening on it. If any activity is detected, you can call the pool check() method, which will run a quick check on each connection in the pool, removing the ones found in broken state, and using the background workers to replace them with fresh ones.

If you set up a similar check in your program, in case the database connection is temporarily lost, we cannot do anything for the threads which had taken already a connection from the pool, but no other thread should be served a broken connection, because check() would empty the pool and refill it with working connections, as soon as they are available.

Faster than you can say poll. Or pool.

Pool stats #

The pool can return information about its usage using the methods get_stats() or pop_stats() . Both methods return the same values, but the latter reset the counters after its use. The values can be sent to a monitoring system such as Graphite or Prometheus .

The following values should be provided, but please don’t consider them as a rigid interface: it is possible that they might change in the future. Keys whose value is 0 may not be returned.

Metric

Meaning

pool_min

Current value for min_size

pool_max

Current value for max_size

pool_size

Number of connections currently managed by the pool (in the pool, given to clients, being prepared)

pool_available

Number of connections currently idle in the pool

requests_waiting

Number of requests currently waiting in a queue to receive a connection

usage_ms

Total usage time of the connections outside the pool

requests_num

Number of connections requested to the pool

requests_queued

Number of requests queued because a connection wasn’t immediately available in the pool

requests_wait_ms

Total time in the queue for the clients waiting

requests_errors

Number of connection requests resulting in an error (timeouts, queue full…)

returns_bad

Number of connections returned to the pool in a bad state

connections_num

Number of connection attempts made by the pool to the server

connections_ms

Total time spent to establish connections with the server

connections_errors

Number of failed connection attempts

connections_lost

Number of connections lost identified by check()

Cursor types #

Psycopg can manage kinds of "cursors" which differ in where the state of a query being processed is stored: Client-side cursors and Server-side cursors .

Client-side cursors #

Client-side cursors are what Psycopg uses in its normal querying process. They are implemented by the Cursor and AsyncCursor classes. In such querying pattern, after a cursor sends a query to the server (usually calling execute() ), the server replies transferring to the client the whole set of results requested, which is stored in the state of the same cursor and from where it can be read from Python code (using methods such as fetchone() and siblings).

This querying process is very scalable because, after a query result has been transmitted to the client, the server doesn’t keep any state. Because the results are already in the client memory, iterating its rows is very quick.

The downside of this querying method is that the entire result has to be transmitted completely to the client (with a time proportional to its size) and the client needs enough memory to hold it, so it is only suitable for reasonably small result sets.

Client-side-binding cursors #

New in version 3.1.

The previously described client-side cursors send the query and the parameters separately to the server. This is the most efficient way to process parametrised queries and allows to build several features and optimizations. However, not all types of queries can be bound server-side; in particular no Data Definition Language query can. See Server-side binding for the description of these problems.

The ClientCursor (and its AsyncClientCursor async counterpart) merge the query on the client and send the query and the parameters merged together to the server. This allows to parametrize any type of PostgreSQL statement, not only queries ( SELECT ) and Data Manipulation statements ( INSERT , UPDATE , DELETE ).

Using ClientCursor , Psycopg 3 behaviour will be more similar to psycopg2 (which only implements client-side binding) and could be useful to port Psycopg 2 programs more easily to Psycopg 3. The objects in the sql module allow for greater flexibility (for instance to parametrize a table name too, not only values); however, for simple cases, a ClientCursor could be the right object.

In order to obtain ClientCursor from a connection, you can set its cursor_factory (at init time or changing its attribute afterwards):

from psycopg import connect, ClientCursor

conn = psycopg.connect(DSN, cursor_factory=ClientCursor)
cur = conn.cursor()
# 

If you need to create a one-off client-side-binding cursor out of a normal connection, you can just use the ClientCursor class passing the connection as argument.

conn = psycopg.connect(DSN)
cur = psycopg.ClientCursor(conn)

Warning

Client-side cursors don’t support binary parameters and return values and don’t support prepared statements .

Tip

The best use for client-side binding cursors is probably to port large Psycopg 2 code to Psycopg 3, especially for programs making wide use of Data Definition Language statements.

The psycopg.sql module allows for more generic client-side query composition, to mix client- and server-side parameters binding, and allows to parametrize tables and fields names too, or entirely generic SQL snippets.

Server-side cursors #

PostgreSQL has its own concept of cursor too (sometimes also called portal ). When a database cursor is created, the query is not necessarily completely processed: the server might be able to produce results only as they are needed. Only the results requested are transmitted to the client: if the query result is very large but the client only needs the first few records it is possible to transmit only them.

The downside is that the server needs to keep track of the partially processed results, so it uses more memory and resources on the server.

Psycopg allows the use of server-side cursors using the classes ServerCursor and AsyncServerCursor . They are usually created by passing the name parameter to the cursor() method (reason for which, in psycopg2 , they are usually called named cursors ). The use of these classes is similar to their client-side counterparts: their interface is the same, but behind the scene they send commands to control the state of the cursor on the server (for instance when fetching new records or when moving using scroll() ).

Using a server-side cursor it is possible to process datasets larger than what would fit in the client’s memory. However for small queries they are less efficient because it takes more commands to receive their result, so you should use them only if you need to process huge results or if only a partial result is needed.

See also

Server-side cursors are created and managed by ServerCursor using SQL commands such as DECLARE , FETCH , MOVE . The PostgreSQL documentation gives a good idea of what is possible to do with them.

"Stealing" an existing cursor #

A Psycopg ServerCursor can be also used to consume a cursor which was created in other ways than the DECLARE that ServerCursor.execute() runs behind the scene.

For instance if you have a PL/pgSQL function returning a cursor :

CREATE FUNCTION reffunc(refcursor) RETURNS refcursor AS $$
BEGIN
    OPEN $1 FOR SELECT col FROM test;
    RETURN $1;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

you can run a one-off command in the same connection to call it (e.g. using Connection.execute() ) in order to create the cursor on the server:

conn.execute("SELECT reffunc('curname')")

after which you can create a server-side cursor declared by the same name, and directly call the fetch methods, skipping the execute() call:

cur = conn.cursor('curname')
# no cur.execute()
for record in cur:  # or cur.fetchone(), cur.fetchmany()...
    # do something with record

Data adaptation configuration #

The adaptation system is at the core of Psycopg and allows to customise the way Python objects are converted to PostgreSQL when a query is performed and how PostgreSQL values are converted to Python objects when query results are returned.

Note

For a high-level view of the conversion of types between Python and PostgreSQL please look at Passing parameters to SQL queries . Using the objects described in this page is useful if you intend to customise the adaptation rules.

  • Adaptation configuration is performed by changing the adapters object of objects implementing the AdaptContext protocol, for instance Connection or Cursor .

  • Every context object derived from another context inherits its adapters mapping: cursors created from a connection inherit the connection’s configuration.

    By default, connections obtain an adapters map from the global map exposed as psycopg.adapters : changing the content of this object will affect every connection created afterwards. You may specify a different template adapters map using the context parameter on connect() .

    _images/adapt.svg
  • The adapters attributes are AdaptersMap instances, and contain the mapping from Python types and Dumper classes, and from PostgreSQL OIDs to Loader classes. Changing this mapping (e.g. writing and registering your own adapters, or using a different configuration of builtin adapters) affects how types are converted between Python and PostgreSQL.

    • Dumpers (objects implementing the Dumper protocol) are the objects used to perform the conversion from a Python object to a bytes sequence in a format understood by PostgreSQL. The string returned shouldn’t be quoted : the value will be passed to the database using functions such as PQexecParams() so quoting and quotes escaping is not necessary. The dumper usually also suggests to the server what type to use, via its oid attribute.

    • Loaders (objects implementing the Loader protocol) are the objects used to perform the opposite operation: reading a bytes sequence from PostgreSQL and creating a Python object out of it.

    • Dumpers and loaders are instantiated on demand by a Transformer object when a query is executed.

Note

Changing adapters in a context only affects that context and its children objects created afterwards ; the objects already created are not affected. For instance, changing the global context will only change newly created connections, not the ones already existing.

Writing a custom adapter: XML #

Psycopg doesn’t provide adapters for the XML data type, because there are just too many ways of handling XML in Python. Creating a loader to parse the PostgreSQL xml type to ElementTree is very simple, using the psycopg.adapt.Loader base class and implementing the load() method:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> from psycopg.adapt import Loader

>>> # Create a class implementing the `load()` method.
>>> class XmlLoader(Loader):
...     def load(self, data):
...         return ET.fromstring(data)

>>> # Register the loader on the adapters of a context.
>>> conn.adapters.register_loader("xml", XmlLoader)

>>> # Now just query the database returning XML data.
>>> cur = conn.execute(
...     """select XMLPARSE (DOCUMENT '
...            Manual...')
...     """)

>>> elem = cur.fetchone()[0]
>>> elem

The opposite operation, converting Python objects to PostgreSQL, is performed by dumpers. The psycopg.adapt.Dumper base class makes it easy to implement one: you only need to implement the dump() method:

>>> from psycopg.adapt import Dumper

>>> class XmlDumper(Dumper):
...     # Setting an OID is not necessary but can be helpful
...     oid = psycopg.adapters.types["xml"].oid
...
...     def dump(self, elem):
...         return ET.tostring(elem)

>>> # Register the dumper on the adapters of a context
>>> conn.adapters.register_dumper(ET.Element, XmlDumper)

>>> # Now, in that context, it is possible to use ET.Element objects as parameters
>>> conn.execute("SELECT xpath('//title/text()', %s)", [elem]).fetchone()[0]
['Manual']

Note that it is possible to use a TypesRegistry , exposed by any AdaptContext , to obtain information on builtin types, or extension types if they have been registered on that context using the TypeInfo . register() method.

Example: PostgreSQL numeric to Python float #

Normally PostgreSQL numeric values are converted to Python Decimal instances, because both the types allow fixed-precision arithmetic and are not subject to rounding.

Sometimes, however, you may want to perform floating-point math on numeric values, and Decimal may get in the way (maybe because it is slower, or maybe because mixing float and Decimal values causes Python errors).

If you are fine with the potential loss of precision and you simply want to receive numeric values as Python float , you can register on numeric the same Loader class used to load float4 / float8 values. Because the PostgreSQL textual representation of both floats and decimal is the same, the two loaders are compatible.

conn = psycopg.connect()

conn.execute("SELECT 123.45").fetchone()[0]
# Decimal('123.45')

conn.adapters.register_loader("numeric", psycopg.types.numeric.FloatLoader)

conn.execute("SELECT 123.45").fetchone()[0]
# 123.45

In this example the customised adaptation takes effect only on the connection conn and on any cursor created from it, not on other connections.

Example: handling infinity date #

Suppose you want to work with the "infinity" date which is available in PostgreSQL but not handled by Python:

>>> conn.execute("SELECT 'infinity'::date").fetchone()
Traceback (most recent call last):
   ...
DataError: date too large (after year 10K): 'infinity'

One possibility would be to store Python’s datetime.date.max as PostgreSQL infinity. For this, let’s create a subclass for the dumper and the loader and register them in the working scope (globally or just on a connection or cursor):

from datetime import date

# Subclass existing adapters so that the base case is handled normally.
from psycopg.types.datetime import DateLoader, DateDumper

class InfDateDumper(DateDumper):
    def dump(self, obj):
        if obj == date.max:
            return b"infinity"
        elif obj == date.min:
            return b"-infinity"
        else:
            return super().dump(obj)

class InfDateLoader(DateLoader):
    def load(self, data):
        if data == b"infinity":
            return date.max
        elif data == b"-infinity":
            return date.min
        else:
            return super().load(data)

# The new classes can be registered globally, on a connection, on a cursor
cur.adapters.register_dumper(date, InfDateDumper)
cur.adapters.register_loader("date", InfDateLoader)

cur.execute("SELECT %s::text, %s::text", [date(2020, 12, 31), date.max]).fetchone()
# ('2020-12-31', 'infinity')
cur.execute("SELECT '2020-12-31'::date, 'infinity'::date").fetchone()
# (datetime.date(2020, 12, 31), datetime.date(9999, 12, 31))
Dumpers and loaders life cycle #

Registering dumpers and loaders will instruct Psycopg to use them in the queries to follow, in the context where they have been registered.

When a query is performed on a Cursor , a Transformer object is created as a local context to manage adaptation during the query, instantiating the required dumpers and loaders and dispatching the values to perform the wanted conversions from Python to Postgres and back.

  • The Transformer copies the adapters configuration from the Cursor , thus inheriting all the changes made to the global psycopg.adapters configuration, the current Connection , the Cursor .

  • For every Python type passed as query argument, the Transformer will instantiate a Dumper . Usually all the objects of the same type will be converted by the same dumper instance.

    • According to the placeholder used ( %s , %b , %t ), Psycopg may pick a binary or a text dumper. When using the %s " AUTO " format, if the same type has both a text and a binary dumper registered, the last one registered by register_dumper() will be used.

    • Sometimes, just looking at the Python type is not enough to decide the best PostgreSQL type to use (for instance the PostgreSQL type of a Python list depends on the objects it contains, whether to use an integer or bigint depends on the number size…) In these cases the mechanism provided by get_key() and upgrade() is used to create more specific dumpers.

  • The query is executed. Upon successful request, the result is received as a PGresult .

  • For every OID returned by the query, the Transformer will instantiate a Loader . All the values with the same OID will be converted by the same loader instance.

  • Recursive types (e.g. Python lists, PostgreSQL arrays and composite types) will use the same adaptation rules.

As a consequence it is possible to perform certain choices only once per query (e.g. looking up the connection encoding) and then call a fast-path operation for each value to convert.

Querying will fail if a Python object for which there isn’t a Dumper registered (for the right Format ) is used as query parameter. If the query returns a data type whose OID doesn’t have a Loader , the value will be returned as a string (or bytes string for binary types).

Prepared statements #

Psycopg uses an automatic system to manage prepared statements . When a query is prepared, its parsing and planning is stored in the server session, so that further executions of the same query on the same connection (even with different parameters) are optimised.

A query is prepared automatically after it is executed more than prepare_threshold times on a connection. psycopg will make sure that no more than prepared_max statements are planned: if further queries are executed, the least recently used ones are deallocated and the associated resources freed.

Statement preparation can be controlled in several ways:

  • You can decide to prepare a query immediately by passing prepare=True to Connection.execute() or Cursor.execute() . The query is prepared, if it wasn’t already, and executed as prepared from its first use.

  • Conversely, passing prepare=False to execute() will avoid to prepare the query, regardless of the number of times it is executed. The default for the parameter is None , meaning that the query is prepared if the conditions described above are met.

  • You can disable the use of prepared statements on a connection by setting its prepare_threshold attribute to None .

Changed in version 3.1: You can set prepare_threshold as a connect() keyword parameter too.

See also

The PREPARE PostgreSQL documentation contains plenty of details about prepared statements in PostgreSQL.

Note however that Psycopg doesn’t use SQL statements such as PREPARE and EXECUTE , but protocol level commands such as the ones exposed by PQsendPrepare , PQsendQueryPrepared .

Warning

Using external connection poolers, such as PgBouncer, is not compatible with prepared statements, because the same client connection may change the server session it refers to. If such middleware is used you should disable prepared statements, by setting the Connection.prepare_threshold attribute to None .

Pipeline mode support #

New in version 3.1.

The pipeline mode allows PostgreSQL client applications to send a query without having to read the result of the previously sent query. Taking advantage of the pipeline mode, a client will wait less for the server, since multiple queries/results can be sent/received in a single network roundtrip. Pipeline mode can provide a significant performance boost to the application.

Pipeline mode is most useful when the server is distant, i.e., network latency ("ping time") is high, and also when many small operations are being performed in rapid succession. There is usually less benefit in using pipelined commands when each query takes many multiples of the client/server round-trip time to execute. A 100-statement operation run on a server 300 ms round-trip-time away would take 30 seconds in network latency alone without pipelining; with pipelining it may spend as little as 0.3 s waiting for results from the server.

The server executes statements, and returns results, in the order the client sends them. The server will begin executing the commands in the pipeline immediately, not waiting for the end of the pipeline. Note that results are buffered on the server side; the server flushes that buffer when a synchronization point is established.

See also

The PostgreSQL documentation about:

contains many details around when it is most useful to use the pipeline mode and about errors management and interaction with transactions.

Client-server messages flow #

In order to understand better how the pipeline mode works, we should take a closer look at the PostgreSQL client-server message flow .

During normal querying, each statement is transmitted by the client to the server as a stream of request messages, terminating with a Sync message to tell it that it should process the messages sent so far. The server will execute the statement and describe the results back as a stream of messages, terminating with a ReadyForQuery , telling the client that it may now send a new query.

For example, the statement (returning no result):

conn.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s)", ["hello"])

results in the following two groups of messages:

Direction

Message

Python

â–¶

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

â—€

Python

  • ParseComplete

  • BindComplete

  • NoData

  • CommandComplete INSERT 0 1

  • ReadyForQuery

and the query:

conn.execute("SELECT data FROM mytable WHERE id = %s", [1])

results in the two groups of messages:

Direction

Message

Python

â–¶

PostgreSQL

  • Parse SELECT data FROM mytable WHERE id = $1

  • Bind 1

  • Describe

  • Execute

  • Sync

PostgreSQL

â—€

Python

  • ParseComplete

  • BindComplete

  • RowDescription data

  • DataRow hello

  • CommandComplete SELECT 1

  • ReadyForQuery

The two statements, sent consecutively, pay the communication overhead four times, once per leg.

The pipeline mode allows the client to combine several operations in longer streams of messages to the server, then to receive more than one response in a single batch. If we execute the two operations above in a pipeline:

with conn.pipeline():
    conn.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s)", ["hello"])
    conn.execute("SELECT data FROM mytable WHERE id = %s", [1])

they will result in a single roundtrip between the client and the server:

Direction

Message

Python

â–¶

PostgreSQL

  • Parse INSERT INTO ... (VALUE $1)

  • Bind 'hello'

  • Describe

  • Execute

  • Parse SELECT data FROM mytable WHERE id = $1

  • Bind 1

  • Describe

  • Execute

  • Sync (sent only once)

PostgreSQL

â—€

Python

  • ParseComplete

  • BindComplete

  • NoData

  • CommandComplete INSERT 0 1

  • ParseComplete

  • BindComplete

  • RowDescription data

  • DataRow hello

  • CommandComplete SELECT 1

  • ReadyForQuery (sent only once)

Pipeline mode usage #

Psycopg supports the pipeline mode via the Connection.pipeline() method. The method is a context manager: entering the with block yields a Pipeline object. At the end of block, the connection resumes the normal operation mode.

Within the pipeline block, you can use normally one or more cursors to execute several operations, using Connection.execute() , Cursor.execute() and executemany() .

>>> with conn.pipeline():
...     conn.execute("INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (%s)", ["hello"])
...     with conn.cursor() as cur:
...         cur.execute("INSERT INTO othertable VALUES (%s)", ["world"])
...         cur.executemany(
...             "INSERT INTO elsewhere VALUES (%s)",
...             [("one",), ("two",), ("four",)])

Unlike in normal mode, Psycopg will not wait for the server to receive the result of each query; the client will receive results in batches when the server flushes it output buffer.

When a flush (or a sync) is performed, all pending results are sent back to the cursors which executed them. If a cursor had run more than one query, it will receive more than one result; results after the first will be available, in their execution order, using nextset() :

>>> with conn.pipeline():
...     with conn.cursor() as cur:
...        cur.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s) RETURNING *", ["hello"])
...        cur.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s) RETURNING *", ["world"])
...        while True:
...            print(cur.fetchall())
...            if not cur.nextset():
...                break

[(1, 'hello')]
[(2, 'world')]

If any statement encounters an error, the server aborts the current transaction and will not execute any subsequent command in the queue until the next synchronization point ; a PipelineAborted exception is raised for each such command. Query processing resumes after the synchronization point.

Warning

Certain features are not available in pipeline mode, including:

  • COPY is not supported in pipeline mode by PostgreSQL.

  • Cursor.stream() doesn’t make sense in pipeline mode (its job is the opposite of batching!)

  • ServerCursor are currently not implemented in pipeline mode.

Note

Starting from Psycopg 3.1, executemany() makes use internally of the pipeline mode; as a consequence there is no need to handle a pipeline block just to call executemany() once.

Synchronization points #

Flushing query results to the client can happen either when a synchronization point is established by Psycopg:

The server might perform a flush on its own initiative, for instance when the output buffer is full.

Note that, even in autocommit , the server wraps the statements sent in pipeline mode in an implicit transaction, which will be only committed when the Sync is received. As such, a failure in a group of statements will probably invalidate the effect of statements executed after the previous Sync, and will propagate to the following Sync.

For example, in the following block:

>>> with psycopg.connect(autocommit=True) as conn:
...     with conn.pipeline() as p, conn.cursor() as cur:
...         try:
...             cur.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s)", ["one"])
...             cur.execute("INSERT INTO no_such_table (data) VALUES (%s)", ["two"])
...             conn.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s)", ["three"])
...             p.sync()
...         except psycopg.errors.UndefinedTable:
...             pass
...         cur.execute("INSERT INTO mytable (data) VALUES (%s)", ["four"])

there will be an error in the block, relation "no_such_table" does not exist caused by the insert two , but probably raised by the sync() call. At at the end of the block, the table will contain:

=# SELECT * FROM mytable;
+----+------+
 id  data 
+----+------+
  2  four 
+----+------+
(1 row)

because:

  • the value 1 of the sequence is consumed by the statement one , but the record discarded because of the error in the same implicit transaction;

  • the statement three is not executed because the pipeline is aborted (so it doesn’t consume a sequence item);

  • the statement four is executed with success after the Sync has terminated the failed transaction.

Warning

The exact Python statement where an exception caused by a server error is raised is somewhat arbitrary: it depends on when the server flushes its buffered result.

If you want to make sure that a group of statements is applied atomically by the server, do make use of transaction methods such as commit() or transaction() : these methods will also sync the pipeline and raise an exception if there was any error in the commands executed so far.

The fine prints #

Warning

The Pipeline mode is an experimental feature.

Its behaviour, especially around error conditions and concurrency, hasn’t been explored as much as the normal request-response messages pattern, and its async nature makes it inherently more complex.

As we gain more experience and feedback (which is welcome), we might find bugs and shortcomings forcing us to change the current interface or behaviour.

The pipeline mode is available on any currently supported PostgreSQL version, but, in order to make use of it, the client must use a libpq from PostgreSQL 14 or higher. You can use Pipeline.is_supported() to make sure your client has the right library.

Psycopg 3 API #

This sections is a reference for all the public objects exposed by the psycopg module. For a more conceptual description you can take a look at Getting started with Psycopg 3 and More advanced topics .

The psycopg module #

Psycopg implements the Python Database DB API 2.0 specification . As such it also exposes the module-level objects required by the specifications.

psycopg. connect ( conninfo = '' , * , autocommit = False , prepare_threshold = 5 , row_factory = None , cursor_factory = None , context = None , ** kwargs ) #

Connect to a database server and return a new Connection instance.

Return type :

Connection [ Any ]

This is an alias of the class method Connection.connect : see its documentation for details.

If you need an asynchronous connection use AsyncConnection.connect instead.

Exceptions

The standard DBAPI exceptions are exposed both by the !psycopg module and by the psycopg.errors module. The latter also exposes more specific exceptions, mapping to the database error states (see SQLSTATE exceptions ).

!Exception
__ Warning
__ Error
    __ InterfaceError
    __ DatabaseError
        __ DataError
        __ OperationalError
        __ IntegrityError
        __ InternalError
        __ ProgrammingError
        __ NotSupportedError
psycopg. adapters #

The default adapters map establishing how Python and PostgreSQL types are converted into each other.

This map is used as a template when new connections are created, using psycopg.connect() . Its ~psycopg.adapt.AdaptersMap.types attribute is a ~psycopg.types.TypesRegistry containing information about every PostgreSQL builtin type, useful for adaptation customisation (see Data adaptation configuration ):

>>> psycopg.adapters.types["int4"]

Type :

~psycopg.adapt.AdaptersMap

Connection classes #

The Connection and AsyncConnection classes are the main wrappers for a PostgreSQL database session. You can imagine them similar to a psql session.

One of the differences compared to psql is that a Connection usually handles a transaction automatically: other sessions will not be able to see the changes until you have committed them, more or less explicitly. Take a look to Transactions management for the details.

The Connection class #
class psycopg. Connection ( pgconn , row_factory= tuple_row> ) #

Wrapper for a connection to the database.

This class implements a DBAPI-compliant interface . It is what you want to use if you write a "classic", blocking program (eventually using threads or Eventlet/gevent for concurrency). If your program uses asyncio you might want to use AsyncConnection instead.

Connections behave as context managers: on block exit, the current transaction will be committed (or rolled back, in case of exception) and the connection will be closed.

classmethod connect ( conninfo = '' , * , autocommit = False , prepare_threshold = 5 , row_factory = None , cursor_factory = None , context = None , ** kwargs ) #

Connect to a database server and return a new Connection instance.

Return type :

Connection [ Any ]

Parameters :
  • conninfo - The connection string (a postgresql:// url or a list of key=value pairs) to specify where and how to connect.

  • kwargs - Further parameters specifying the connection string. They override the ones specified in !conninfo .

  • autocommit - If !True don’t start transactions automatically. See Transactions management for details.

  • row_factory - The row factory specifying what type of records to create fetching data (default: ~psycopg.rows.tuple_row() ). See Row factories for details.

  • cursor_factory - Initial value for the cursor_factory attribute of the connection (new in Psycopg 3.1).

  • prepare_threshold - Initial value for the prepare_threshold attribute of the connection (new in Psycopg 3.1).

More specialized use:

Parameters :

context - A context to copy the initial adapters configuration from. It might be an ~psycopg.adapt.AdaptersMap with customized loaders and dumpers, used as a template to create several connections. See Data adaptation configuration for further details.

This method is also aliased as psycopg.connect() .

See also

Changed in version 3.1: added !prepare_threshold and !cursor_factory parameters.

close ( ) #

Close the database connection.

Note

You can use:

with psycopg.connect() as conn:
    ...

to close the connection automatically when the block is exited. See Connection context .

closed #

!True if the connection is closed.

broken #

!True if the connection was interrupted.

A broken connection is always closed , but wasn’t closed in a clean way, such as using close() or a !with block.

cursor ( * , binary : bool = False , row_factory : RowFactory None = None ) Cursor #
cursor ( name : str , * , binary : bool = False , row_factory : RowFactory None = None , scrollable : bool None = None , withhold : bool = False ) ServerCursor

Return a new cursor to send commands and queries to the connection.

Parameters :
  • name - If not specified create a client-side cursor, if specified create a server-side cursor. See Cursor types for details.

  • binary - If !True return binary values from the database. All the types returned by the query must have a binary loader. See Binary parameters and results for details.

  • row_factory - If specified override the row_factory set on the connection. See Row factories for details.

  • scrollable - Specify the ~ServerCursor.scrollable property of the server-side cursor created.

  • withhold - Specify the ~ServerCursor.withhold property of the server-side cursor created.

Returns :

A cursor of the class specified by cursor_factory (or server_cursor_factory if !name is specified).

Note

You can use:

with conn.cursor() as cur:
    ...

to close the cursor automatically when the block is exited.

cursor_factory : Type [ Cursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]] #

The type, or factory function, returned by cursor() and execute() .

Default is psycopg.Cursor .

server_cursor_factory : Type [ ServerCursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]] #

The type, or factory function, returned by cursor() when a name is specified.

Default is psycopg.ServerCursor .

row_factory : RowFactory [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)] #

The row factory defining the type of rows returned by ~Cursor.fetchone() and the other cursor fetch methods.

The default is ~psycopg.rows.tuple_row , which means that the fetch methods will return simple tuples.

See also

See Row factories for details about defining the objects returned by cursors.

execute ( query , params = None , * , prepare = None , binary = False ) #

Execute a query and return a cursor to read its results.

Return type :

Cursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

Parameters :
  • query ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The query to execute.

  • params ( Sequence or Mapping ) - The parameters to pass to the query, if any.

  • prepare - Force ( !True ) or disallow ( !False ) preparation of the query. By default ( !None ) prepare automatically. See Prepared statements .

  • binary - If !True the cursor will return binary values from the database. All the types returned by the query must have a binary loader. See Binary parameters and results for details.

The method simply creates a Cursor instance, ~Cursor.execute() the query requested, and returns it.

See Passing parameters to SQL queries for all the details about executing queries.

pipeline ( ) #

Switch the connection into pipeline mode.

Return type :

Iterator [ Pipeline ]

The method is a context manager: you should call it using:

with conn.pipeline() as p:
    ...

At the end of the block, a synchronization point is established and the connection returns in normal mode.

You can call the method recursively from within a pipeline block. Innermost blocks will establish a synchronization point on exit, but pipeline mode will be kept until the outermost block exits.

See Pipeline mode support for details.

New in version 3.1.

Transaction management methods

For details see Transactions management .

commit ( ) #

Commit any pending transaction to the database.

rollback ( ) #

Roll back to the start of any pending transaction.

transaction ( savepoint_name = None , force_rollback = False ) #

Start a context block with a new transaction or nested transaction.

Parameters :
  • savepoint_name ( Optional [ str ]) - Name of the savepoint used to manage a nested transaction. If !None , one will be chosen automatically.

  • force_rollback ( bool ) - Roll back the transaction at the end of the block even if there were no error (e.g. to try a no-op process).

Return type :

Transaction

Note

The method must be called with a syntax such as:

with conn.transaction():
    ...

with conn.transaction() as tx:
    ...

The latter is useful if you need to interact with the Transaction object. See Transaction contexts for details.

Inside a transaction block it will not be possible to call commit() or rollback() .

autocommit #

The autocommit state of the connection.

The property is writable for sync connections, read-only for async ones: you should call !await ~AsyncConnection.set_autocommit ( value ) instead.

The following three properties control the characteristics of new transactions. See Transaction characteristics for details.

isolation_level #

The isolation level of the new transactions started on the connection.

!None means use the default set in the default_transaction_isolation configuration parameter of the server.

read_only #

The read-only state of the new transactions started on the connection.

!None means use the default set in the default_transaction_read_only configuration parameter of the server.

deferrable #

The deferrable state of the new transactions started on the connection.

!None means use the default set in the default_transaction_deferrable configuration parameter of the server.

Checking and configuring the connection state

pgconn : psycopg.pq.PGconn #

The ~pq.PGconn libpq connection wrapper underlying the !Connection .

It can be used to send low level commands to PostgreSQL and access features not currently wrapped by Psycopg.

info #

A ConnectionInfo attribute to inspect connection properties.

prepare_threshold #

Number of times a query is executed before it is prepared.

  • If it is set to 0, every query is prepared the first time it is executed.

  • If it is set to !None , prepared statements are disabled on the connection.

Default value: 5

See Prepared statements for details.

prepared_max #

Maximum number of prepared statements on the connection.

Default value: 100

If more queries need to be prepared, old ones are deallocated .

Methods you can use to do something cool

cancel ( ) #

Cancel the current operation on the connection.

notifies ( ) #

Yield Notify objects as soon as they are received from the database.

Return type :

Generator [ Notify , None , None ]

Notifies are received after using LISTEN in a connection, when any sessions in the database generates a NOTIFY on one of the listened channels.

add_notify_handler ( callback ) #

Register a callable to be invoked whenever a notification is received.

Parameters :

callback ( Callable [ [ Notify ] , None ] ) - the callback to call upon notification received.

See Asynchronous notifications for details.

remove_notify_handler ( callback ) #

Unregister a notification callable previously registered.

Parameters :

callback ( Callable [ [ Notify ] , None ] ) - the callback to remove.

add_notice_handler ( callback ) #

Register a callable to be invoked when a notice message is received.

Parameters :

callback ( Callable [ [ Diagnostic ] , None ] ) - the callback to call upon message received.

See Server messages for details.

remove_notice_handler ( callback ) #

Unregister a notice message callable previously registered.

Parameters :

callback ( Callable [ [ Diagnostic ] , None ] ) - the callback to remove.

fileno ( ) #

Return the file descriptor of the connection.

This function allows to use the connection as file-like object in functions waiting for readiness, such as the ones defined in the selectors module.

Return type :

int

Two-Phase Commit support methods

New in version 3.1.

See also

Two-Phase Commit protocol support for an introductory explanation of these methods.

xid ( format_id , gtrid , bqual ) #

Returns a Xid to pass to the !tpc_*() methods of this connection.

The argument types and constraints are explained in Two-Phase Commit protocol support .

The values passed to the method will be available on the returned object as the members ~Xid.format_id , ~Xid.gtrid , ~Xid.bqual .

Return type :

Xid

tpc_begin ( xid ) #

Begin a TPC transaction with the given transaction ID !xid .

Parameters :

xid ( Xid or str ) - The id of the transaction

This method should be called outside of a transaction (i.e. nothing may have executed since the last commit() or rollback() and ~ConnectionInfo.transaction_status is ~pq.TransactionStatus.IDLE ).

Furthermore, it is an error to call !commit() or !rollback() within the TPC transaction: in this case a ProgrammingError is raised.

The !xid may be either an object returned by the xid() method or a plain string: the latter allows to create a transaction using the provided string as PostgreSQL transaction id. See also tpc_recover() .

tpc_prepare ( ) #

Perform the first phase of a transaction started with tpc_begin() .

A ProgrammingError is raised if this method is used outside of a TPC transaction.

After calling !tpc_prepare() , no statements can be executed until tpc_commit() or tpc_rollback() will be called.

See also

The PREPARE TRANSACTION PostgreSQL command.

tpc_commit ( xid = None ) #

Commit a prepared two-phase transaction.

Parameters :

xid ( Xid or str ) - The id of the transaction

When called with no arguments, !tpc_commit() commits a TPC transaction previously prepared with tpc_prepare() .

If !tpc_commit() is called prior to !tpc_prepare() , a single phase commit is performed. A transaction manager may choose to do this if only a single resource is participating in the global transaction.

When called with a transaction ID !xid , the database commits the given transaction. If an invalid transaction ID is provided, a ProgrammingError will be raised. This form should be called outside of a transaction, and is intended for use in recovery.

On return, the TPC transaction is ended.

See also

The COMMIT PREPARED PostgreSQL command.

tpc_rollback ( xid = None ) #

Roll back a prepared two-phase transaction.

Parameters :

xid ( Xid or str ) - The id of the transaction

When called with no arguments, !tpc_rollback() rolls back a TPC transaction. It may be called before or after tpc_prepare() .

When called with a transaction ID !xid , it rolls back the given transaction. If an invalid transaction ID is provided, a ProgrammingError is raised. This form should be called outside of a transaction, and is intended for use in recovery.

On return, the TPC transaction is ended.

See also

The ROLLBACK PREPARED PostgreSQL command.

tpc_recover ( ) #
Return type :

List [ Xid ]

Returns a list of Xid representing pending transactions, suitable for use with tpc_commit() or tpc_rollback() .

If a transaction was not initiated by Psycopg, the returned Xids will have attributes ~Xid.format_id and ~Xid.bqual set to !None and the ~Xid.gtrid set to the PostgreSQL transaction ID: such Xids are still usable for recovery. Psycopg uses the same algorithm of the PostgreSQL JDBC driver to encode a XA triple in a string, so transactions initiated by a program using such driver should be unpacked correctly.

Xids returned by !tpc_recover() also have extra attributes ~Xid.prepared , ~Xid.owner , ~Xid.database populated with the values read from the server.

See also

the pg_prepared_xacts system view.

The !AsyncConnection class #
class psycopg. AsyncConnection ( pgconn , row_factory= tuple_row> ) #

Asynchronous wrapper for a connection to the database.

This class implements a DBAPI-inspired interface, with all the blocking methods implemented as coroutines. Unless specified otherwise, non-blocking methods are shared with the Connection class.

The following methods have the same behaviour of the matching !Connection methods, but should be called using the await keyword.

async classmethod connect ( conninfo = '' , * , autocommit = False , prepare_threshold = 5 , context = None , row_factory = None , cursor_factory = None , ** kwargs ) #
Return type :

AsyncConnection [ Any ]

Changed in version 3.1: Automatically resolve domain names asynchronously. In previous versions, name resolution blocks, unless the !hostaddr parameter is specified, or the ~psycopg._dns.resolve_hostaddr_async() function is used.

async close ( ) #

Note

You can use async with to close the connection automatically when the block is exited, but be careful about the async quirkness: see with async connections for details.

cursor ( * , binary : bool = False , row_factory : RowFactory None = None ) AsyncCursor #
cursor ( name : str , * , binary : bool = False , row_factory : RowFactory None = None , scrollable : bool None = None , withhold : bool = False ) AsyncServerCursor

Note

You can use:

async with conn.cursor() as cur:
    ...

to close the cursor automatically when the block is exited.

cursor_factory : Type [ AsyncCursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]] #

Default is psycopg.AsyncCursor .

server_cursor_factory : Type [ AsyncServerCursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]] #

Default is psycopg.AsyncServerCursor .

row_factory : AsyncRowFactory [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)] #
async execute ( query , params = None , * , prepare = None , binary = False ) #
Return type :

AsyncCursor [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

pipeline ( ) #

Context manager to switch the connection into pipeline mode.

Return type :

AsyncIterator [ AsyncPipeline ]

Note

It must be called as:

async with conn.pipeline() as p:
    ...
async commit ( ) #
async rollback ( ) #
transaction ( savepoint_name = None , force_rollback = False ) #

Start a context block with a new transaction or nested transaction.

Return type :

AsyncTransaction

Note

It must be called as:

async with conn.transaction() as tx:
    ...
async notifies ( ) #
Return type :

AsyncGenerator [ Notify , None ]

async set_autocommit ( value ) #

Async version of the ~Connection.autocommit setter.

async set_isolation_level ( value ) #

Async version of the ~Connection.isolation_level setter.

async set_read_only ( value ) #

Async version of the ~Connection.read_only setter.

async set_deferrable ( value ) #

Async version of the ~Connection.deferrable setter.

async tpc_prepare ( ) #
async tpc_commit ( xid = None ) #
async tpc_rollback ( xid = None ) #
async tpc_recover ( ) #
Return type :

List [ Xid ]

Cursor classes #

The Cursor and AsyncCursor classes are the main objects to send commands to a PostgreSQL database session. They are normally created by the connection’s cursor() method.

Using the name parameter on cursor() will create a ServerCursor or AsyncServerCursor , which can be used to retrieve partial results from a database.

A Connection can create several cursors, but only one at time can perform operations, so they are not the best way to achieve parallelism (you may want to operate with several connections instead). All the cursors on the same connection have a view of the same session, so they can see each other’s uncommitted data.

The Cursor class #
class psycopg. Cursor ( connection , * , row_factory = None ) #

This class implements a DBAPI-compliant interface . It is what the classic Connection.cursor() method returns. AsyncConnection.cursor() will create instead AsyncCursor objects, which have the same set of method but expose an asyncio interface and require async and await keywords to operate.

Cursors behave as context managers: on block exit they are closed and further operation will not be possible. Closing a cursor will not terminate a transaction or a session though.

connection : Connection #

The connection this cursor is using.

close ( ) #

Close the current cursor and free associated resources.

Note

You can use:

with conn.cursor() as cur:
    ...

to close the cursor automatically when the block is exited. See Main objects in Psycopg 3 .

closed #

True if the cursor is closed.

Methods to send commands

execute ( query , params = None , * , prepare = None , binary = None ) #

Execute a query or command to the database.

Return type :

TypeVar ( _Self , bound= Cursor[Any])

Parameters :
  • query ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The query to execute.

  • params ( Sequence or Mapping ) - The parameters to pass to the query, if any.

  • prepare - Force ( !True ) or disallow ( !False ) preparation of the query. By default ( !None ) prepare automatically. See Prepared statements .

  • binary - Specify whether the server should return data in binary format ( !True ) or in text format ( !False ). By default ( !None ) return data as requested by the cursor’s ~Cursor.format .

Return the cursor itself, so that it will be possible to chain a fetch operation after the call.

See Passing parameters to SQL queries for all the details about executing queries.

Changed in version 3.1: The query argument must be a ~typing.StringLiteral . If you need to compose a query dynamically, please use sql.SQL and related objects.

See PEP 675 for details.

executemany ( query , params_seq , * , returning = False ) #

Execute the same command with a sequence of input data.

Parameters :
  • query ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The query to execute

  • params_seq ( Sequence of Sequences or Mappings ) - The parameters to pass to the query

  • returning ( !bool ) - If !True , fetch the results of the queries executed

This is more efficient than performing separate queries, but in case of several INSERT (and with some SQL creativity for massive UPDATE too) you may consider using copy() .

If the queries return data you want to read (e.g. when executing an INSERT ... RETURNING or a SELECT with a side-effect), you can specify !returning=True ; the results will be available in the cursor’s state and can be read using fetchone() and similar methods. Each input parameter will produce a separate result set: use nextset() to read the results of the queries after the first one.

The value of rowcount is set to the cumulated number of rows affected by queries; except when using !returning=True , in which case it is set to the number of rows in the current result set (i.e. the first one, until nextset() gets called).

See Passing parameters to SQL queries for all the details about executing queries.

Changed in version 3.1:

  • Added !returning parameter to receive query results.

  • Performance optimised by making use of the pipeline mode, when using libpq 14 or newer.

copy ( statement , params = None , * , writer = None ) #

Initiate a COPY operation and return an object to manage it.

Return type :

Copy

Parameters :
  • statement ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The copy operation to execute

  • params ( Sequence or Mapping ) - The parameters to pass to the statement, if any.

Note

The method must be called with:

with cursor.copy() as copy:
    ...

See Using COPY TO and COPY FROM for information about COPY .

Changed in version 3.1: Added parameters support.

stream ( query , params = None , * , binary = None ) #

Iterate row-by-row on a result from the database.

Return type :

Iterator [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

This command is similar to execute + iter; however it supports endless data streams. The feature is not available in PostgreSQL, but some implementations exist: Materialize TAIL and CockroachDB CHANGEFEED for instance.

The feature, and the API supporting it, are still experimental. Beware… 👀

The parameters are the same of execute() .

Warning

Failing to consume the iterator entirely will result in a connection left in ~psycopg.ConnectionInfo.transaction_status ~pq.TransactionStatus.ACTIVE state: this connection will refuse to receive further commands (with a message such as another command is already in progress ).

If there is a chance that the generator is not consumed entirely, in order to restore the connection to a working state you can call ~generator.close on the generator object returned by !stream() . The contextlib.closing function might be particularly useful to make sure that !close() is called:

with closing(cur.stream("select generate_series(1, 10000)")) as gen:
    for rec in gen:
        something(rec)  # might fail

Without calling !close() , in case of error, the connection will be !ACTIVE and unusable. If !close() is called, the connection might be !INTRANS or !INERROR , depending on whether the server managed to send the entire resultset to the client. An autocommit connection will be !IDLE instead.

format #

The format of the data returned by the queries. It can be selected initially e.g. specifying Connection.cursor !(binary=True) and changed during the cursor’s lifetime. It is also possible to override the value for single queries, e.g. specifying execute !(binary=True) .

Type :

pq.Format

Default :

~pq.Format.TEXT

Methods to retrieve results

Fetch methods are only available if the last operation produced results, e.g. a SELECT or a command with RETURNING . They will raise an exception if used with operations that don’t return result, such as an INSERT with no RETURNING or an ALTER TABLE .

Note

Cursors are iterable objects, so just using the:

for record in cursor:
    ...

syntax will iterate on the records in the current recordset.

row_factory #

Writable attribute to control how result rows are formed.

The property affects the objects returned by the fetchone() , fetchmany() , fetchall() methods. The default ( ~psycopg.rows.tuple_row ) returns a tuple for each record fetched.

See Row factories for details.

fetchone ( ) #

Return the next record from the current recordset.

Return !None the recordset is finished.

Return type :

Optional[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

fetchmany ( size = 0 ) #

Return the next !size records from the current recordset.

!size default to !self.arraysize if not specified.

Return type :

Sequence[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

fetchall ( ) #

Return all the remaining records from the current recordset.

Return type :

Sequence[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

nextset ( ) #

Move to the result set of the next query executed through executemany() or to the next result set if execute() returned more than one.

Return !True if a new result is available, which will be the one methods !fetch*() will operate on.

Return type :

Optional [ bool ]

scroll ( value , mode = 'relative' ) #

Move the cursor in the result set to a new position according to mode.

If !mode is 'relative' (default), !value is taken as offset to the current position in the result set; if set to 'absolute' , !value states an absolute target position.

Raise !IndexError in case a scroll operation would leave the result set. In this case the position will not change.

pgresult : psycopg.pq.PGresult None #

The result returned by the last query and currently exposed by the cursor, if available, else !None .

It can be used to obtain low level info about the last query result and to access to features not currently wrapped by Psycopg.

Information about the data

description #

A list of Column objects describing the current resultset.

!None if the current resultset didn’t return tuples.

statusmessage #

The command status tag from the last SQL command executed.

!None if the cursor doesn’t have a result available.

This is the status tag you typically see in psql after a successful command, such as CREATE TABLE or UPDATE 42 .

rowcount #

Number of records affected by the precedent operation.

From executemany() , unless called with !returning=True , this is the cumulated number of rows affected by executed commands.

rownumber #

Index of the next row to fetch in the current result.

!None if there is no result to fetch.

_query #

An helper object used to convert queries and parameters before sending them to PostgreSQL.

Note

This attribute is exposed because it might be helpful to debug problems when the communication between Python and PostgreSQL doesn’t work as expected. For this reason, the attribute is available when a query fails too.

Warning

You shouldn’t consider it part of the public interface of the object: it might change without warnings.

Except this warning, I guess.

If you would like to build reliable features using this object, please get in touch so we can try and design an useful interface for it.

Among the properties currently exposed by this object:

  • !query ( !bytes ): the query effectively sent to PostgreSQL. It will have Python placeholders ( %s -style) replaced with PostgreSQL ones ( $1 , $2 -style).

  • !params (sequence of !bytes ): the parameters passed to PostgreSQL, adapted to the database format.

  • !types (sequence of !int ): the OID of the parameters passed to PostgreSQL.

  • !formats (sequence of pq.Format ): whether the parameter format is text or binary.

The !ClientCursor class #

See also

See Client-side-binding cursors for details.

class psycopg. ClientCursor ( connection , * , row_factory = None ) #

This Cursor subclass has exactly the same interface of its parent class, but, instead of sending query and parameters separately to the server, it merges them on the client and sends them as a non-parametric query on the server. This allows, for instance, to execute parametrized data definition statements and other problematic queries .

New in version 3.1.

mogrify ( query , params = None ) #

Return the query and parameters merged.

Parameters are adapted and merged to the query the same way that !execute() would do.

Return type :

str

Parameters :
  • query ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The query to execute.

  • params ( Sequence or Mapping ) - The parameters to pass to the query, if any.

The !ServerCursor class #

See also

See Server-side cursors for details.

class psycopg. ServerCursor ( connection , name , * , row_factory = None , scrollable = None , withhold = False ) #

This class also implements a DBAPI-compliant interface . It is created by Connection.cursor() specifying the !name parameter. Using this object results in the creation of an equivalent PostgreSQL cursor in the server. DBAPI-extension methods (such as ~Cursor.copy() or ~Cursor.stream() ) are not implemented on this object: use a normal Cursor instead.

Most attribute and methods behave exactly like in Cursor , here are documented the differences:

name #

The name of the cursor.

scrollable #

Whether the cursor is scrollable or not.

If !None leave the choice to the server. Use !True if you want to use scroll() on the cursor.

See also

The PostgreSQL DECLARE statement documentation for the description of [NO] SCROLL .

withhold #

If the cursor can be used after the creating transaction has committed.

See also

The PostgreSQL DECLARE statement documentation for the description of {WITHWITHOUT} HOLD .

close ( ) #

Close the current cursor and free associated resources.

Warning

Closing a server-side cursor is more important than closing a client-side one because it also releases the resources on the server, which otherwise might remain allocated until the end of the session (memory, locks). Using the pattern:

with conn.cursor():
    ...

is especially useful so that the cursor is closed at the end of the block.

execute ( query , params = None , * , binary = None , ** kwargs ) #

Open a cursor to execute a query to the database.

Return type :

TypeVar ( _Self , bound= ServerCursor[Any])

Parameters :
  • query ( !str , !bytes , sql.SQL , or sql.Composed ) - The query to execute.

  • params ( Sequence or Mapping ) - The parameters to pass to the query, if any.

  • binary - Specify whether the server should return data in binary format ( !True ) or in text format ( !False ). By default ( !None ) return data as requested by the cursor’s ~Cursor.format .

Create a server cursor with given !name and the !query in argument.

If using DECLARE is not appropriate (for instance because the cursor is returned by calling a stored procedure) you can avoid to use !execute() , crete the cursor in other ways, and use directly the !fetch*() methods instead. See "Stealing" an existing cursor for an example.

Using !execute() more than once will close the previous cursor and open a new one with the same name.

executemany ( query , params_seq , * , returning = True ) #

Method not implemented for server-side cursors.

fetchone ( ) #

Return the next record from the current recordset.

Return !None the recordset is finished.

Return type :

Optional[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

fetchmany ( size = 0 ) #

Return the next !size records from the current recordset.

!size default to !self.arraysize if not specified.

Return type :

Sequence[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

fetchall ( ) #

Return all the remaining records from the current recordset.

Return type :

Sequence[Row], with Row defined by row_factory

These methods use the FETCH SQL statement to retrieve some of the records from the cursor’s current position.

Note

You can also iterate on the cursor to read its result one at time with:

for record in cur:
    ...

In this case, the records are not fetched one at time from the server but they are retrieved in batches of itersize to reduce the number of server roundtrips.

itersize : int #

Number of records to fetch at time when iterating on the cursor. The default is 100.

scroll ( value , mode = 'relative' ) #

Move the cursor in the result set to a new position according to mode.

If !mode is 'relative' (default), !value is taken as offset to the current position in the result set; if set to 'absolute' , !value states an absolute target position.

Raise !IndexError in case a scroll operation would leave the result set. In this case the position will not change.

This method uses the MOVE SQL statement to move the current position in the server-side cursor, which will affect following !fetch*() operations. If you need to scroll backwards you should probably call ~Connection.cursor() using scrollable=True .

Note that PostgreSQL doesn’t provide a reliable way to report when a cursor moves out of bound, so the method might not raise !IndexError when it happens, but it might rather stop at the cursor boundary.

The !AsyncCursor class #
class psycopg. AsyncCursor ( connection , * , row_factory = None ) #

This class implements a DBAPI-inspired interface, with all the blocking methods implemented as coroutines. Unless specified otherwise, non-blocking methods are shared with the Cursor class.

The following methods have the same behaviour of the matching !Cursor methods, but should be called using the await keyword.

connection : AsyncConnection #
async close ( ) #

Note

You can use:

async with conn.cursor():
    ...

to close the cursor automatically when the block is exited.

async execute ( query , params = None , * , prepare = None , binary = None ) #
Return type :

TypeVar ( _Self , bound= AsyncCursor[Any])

async executemany ( query , params_seq , * , returning = False ) #
copy ( statement , params = None , * , writer = None ) #
Return type :

AsyncCopy

Note

The method must be called with:

async with cursor.copy() as copy:
    ...
async stream ( query , params = None , * , binary = None ) #
Return type :

AsyncIterator [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

Note

The method must be called with:

async for record in cursor.stream(query):
    ...
async fetchone ( ) #
Return type :

Optional [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

async fetchmany ( size = 0 ) #
Return type :

List [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

async fetchall ( ) #
Return type :

List [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

async scroll ( value , mode = 'relative' ) #

Note

You can also use:

async for record in cursor:
    ...

to iterate on the async cursor results.

The !AsyncClientCursor class #
class psycopg. AsyncClientCursor ( connection , * , row_factory = None ) #

This class is the !async equivalent of the ClientCursor . The difference are the same shown in AsyncCursor .

New in version 3.1.

The !AsyncServerCursor class #
class psycopg. AsyncServerCursor ( connection , name , * , row_factory = None , scrollable = None , withhold = False ) #

This class implements a DBAPI-inspired interface as the AsyncCursor does, but wraps a server-side cursor like the ServerCursor class. It is created by AsyncConnection.cursor() specifying the !name parameter.

The following are the methods exposing a different (async) interface from the ServerCursor counterpart, but sharing the same semantics.

async close ( ) #

Note

You can close the cursor automatically using:

async with conn.cursor("name") as cursor:
    ...
async execute ( query , params = None , * , binary = None , ** kwargs ) #
Return type :

TypeVar ( _Self , bound= AsyncServerCursor[Any])

async executemany ( query , params_seq , * , returning = True ) #
async fetchone ( ) #
Return type :

Optional [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

async fetchmany ( size = 0 ) #
Return type :

List [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

async fetchall ( ) #
Return type :

List [ TypeVar ( Row , covariant=True)]

Note

You can also iterate on the cursor using:

async for record in cur:
    ...
async scroll ( value , mode = 'relative' ) #