Turbodbc is a Python module to access relational databases via the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface. The module complies with the Python Database API Specification 2.0.

Short answer: turbodbc is faster.

Slightly longer answer: I have tested turbodbc and pyodbc (probably the most popular Python ODBC module) with various databases (Exasol, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and corresponding ODBC drivers. I found turbodbc to be consistently faster.

For retrieving result sets, I found speedups between 1.5 and 7. For inserting data, I found speedups of up to 100.

Is this completely scientific? Not at all. I have not told you about which hardware I used, which operating systems, drivers, database versions, network bandwidth, database layout, SQL queries, what is measured, and how I performed was measured.

All I can tell you is that if I exchange pyodbc with turbodbc, my benchmarks took less time, often approaching one (reading) or two (writing) orders of magnitude. Give it a spin for yourself, and tell me if you liked it.

There is not really a trick. Turbodbc implements both sending parameters and retrieving result sets using buffers of multiple rows/parameter sets. This avoids round trips to the ODBC driver and (depending how well the ODBC driver is written) to the database.

• Bulk retrieval of select statements
• Bulk transfer of query parameters
• Automatic conversion of decimal type to integer, float, and string as appropriate
• Supported data types for both result sets and parameters: int, float, str, bool, datetime.date, datetime.datetime
• Also provides a high-level C++11 database driver under the hood

To install turbodbc, please make sure you have the following things installed:

• A modern g++ compiler (works with 4.7.2+)
• Boost development headers (typical package name: libboost-all-devel)
• Unixodbc development headers
• Python 2.7 development headers

To install turbodbc, please use the following command:

pip install turbodbc

Turbodbc follows the specification of the Python database API v2, which you can find at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/. Here is a short summary, including the parts not specified.

To establish a connection, use any of the following commands:

>>> from turbodbc import connect
>>> connection = connect(dsn='My data source name as given by odbc.ini')
>>> connection = connect(dsn='my dsn', user='my user has precedence')
>>> connection = connect(dsn='my dsn', username='field names depend on the driver')

To execute a query, you need a cursor object:

>>> cursor = connection.cursor()

Here is how to execute a SELECT query:

>>> cursor.execute('SELECT 42')
>>> for row in cursor:
>>>     print list(row)

Here is how to execute an INSERT query with many parameters:

>>> parameter_sets = [['hi', 42],
                      ['there', 23]]
>>> cursor.executemany('INSERT INTO my_table VALUES (?, ?)',
                       parameter_sets)

To use the latest version of turbodbc, you need to follow these steps:

• Get the source code from github

• Check the source build requirements (see below) are installed on your computer

• Create a build directory. Make this your working directory.

• Execute the following command:

  cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./dist /path/to/source/directory
  

  This will prepare the build directory for the actual build step.

• Execute the make command to build the code.

• You can execute the tests with ctest.

• To create a Python source distribution for simple installation, use the following commands:

  make install
  cd dist
  python setup.py sdist
  

  This will create a .tar.gz file in the folder dist/dist in your build directory. This file is self-contained and can be installed by other users using pip install.

For the development build, you also require the following additional dependencies:

• CMake

• Linux (successfully built on Ubuntu 12, Ubuntu 14, Debian 7)
• Python 2.7 only (yet)