Introduction

Getting started

Generally, you will want to install pymssql with:

pip install -U pip
pip install pymssql

Most of the times this should be all what’s needed. If you want to build pymssql module against locally installed libraries then install required software (see Building and developing pymssql for more details) and run:

pip install --no-binary=pymssql pymssql

Note

On some Linux distributions pip version is too old to support all the flavors of manylinux wheels, so upgrading pip is necessary. An example of such distributions would be Ubuntu 18.04 or Python3.6 module in RHEL8 and CentOS8.

Note

Starting with pymssql version 2.1.3 we provide such wheel packages that bundle a static copy of FreeTDS so no additional dependency download or compilation steps are necessary.

Note

Starting with pymssql version 2.2.0 official pymssql wheel packages for Linux, Mac OS and Windows have SSL support so they can be used to connect to Azure.

  • Anaconda / Miniconda

    A conda install of pymssql will mitigate the need to edit config files outside of the user’s home directory on some unix-like systems. This is especially useful when root access is restricted and/or Homebrew can’t be installed. This method requires no additional compilation or configuration.

    conda install pymssql

See Installation and Building and developing pymssql for more advanced scenarios.

Docker

(Experimental)

Another possible way to get started quickly with pymssql is to use a Docker image.

Architecture

_images/pymssql-stack.png

The pymssql package consists of two modules:

  • pymssql – use it if you care about DB-API compliance, or if you are accustomed to DB-API syntax,

  • _mssql – use it if you care about performance and ease of use (_mssql module is easier to use than pymssql).

And, as of version 2.1.x it uses the services of the db-lib component of FreeTDS. See the relevant FreeTDS documentation for additional details.

Project Discussion

Discussions and support take place on pymssql mailing list here: http://groups.google.com/group/pymssql, you can participate via web, e-mail or read-only subscribing to the mailing list feeds.

This is the best place to get help, please feel free to drop by and ask a question.

Project Status

Current release: 2.x is the branch under current development. It is a complete rewrite using Cython and the latest FreeTDS libraries (which remove many of the limitations of previous versions of FreeTDS).

Legacy release: 1.0.3 is the legacy version and is no longer under active development.

Note

This documentation is for pymssql 2.x.

The document set you are reading describes exclusively the code base of pymssql 2.x and newer. All description of functionality, workarounds, limitations, dependencies, etc. of older revisions has been removed.

If you need help for building/using pymssql 1.x please refer to the old Google Code documentation Wiki.

Current Development

Official development repositories and issue trackers have been moved to GitHub at https://github.com/pymssql/pymssql.

We would be happy to have:

  • A couple more developers

  • Help from the community with maintenance of this documentation.

If interested, please connect with us on the mailing list.