Is it possible to store Python class objects in SQLite?

Question

I would like to store Python objects into a SQLite database. Is that possible?

If so what would be some links / examples for it?

Answer 1

You can't store the object itself in the DB. What you do is to store the data from the object and reconstruct it later.

A good way is to use the excellent SQLAlchemy library. It lets you map your defined class to a table in the database. Every mapped attribute will be stored, and can be used to reconstruct the object. Querying the database returns instances of your class.

With it you can use not only sqlite, but most databases - It currently also supports Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL, Firebird, MaxDB, MS Access, Sybase, Informix and IBM DB2. And you can have your user choose which one she wants to use, because you can basically switch between those databases without changing the code at all.

There are also a lot of cool features - like automatic JOINs, polymorphing...

A quick, simple example you can run:

from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, Unicode, UnicodeText, String
from sqlalchemy import create_engine
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base

from random import choice
from string import letters

engine = create_engine('sqlite:////tmp/teste.db', echo=True)
Base = declarative_base(bind=engine)

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'users'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(Unicode(40))
    address = Column(UnicodeText, nullable=True)
    password = Column(String(20))

    def __init__(self, name, address=None, password=None):
        self.name = name
        self.address = address
        if password is None:
            password = ''.join(choice(letters) for n in xrange(10))
        self.password = password

Base.metadata.create_all()

Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
s = Session()

Then I can use it like this:

# create instances of my user object
u = User('nosklo')
u.address = '66 Some Street #500'

u2 = User('lakshmipathi')
u2.password = 'ihtapimhskal'

# testing
s.add_all([u, u2])
s.commit()

That would run INSERT statements against the database.

# When you query the data back it returns instances of your class:

for user in s.query(User):
    print type(user), user.name, user.password

That query would run SELECT users.id AS users_id, users.name AS users_name, users.address AS users_address, users.password AS users_password.

The printed result would be:

 nosklo aBPDXlTPJs
 lakshmipathi ihtapimhskal

So you're effectively storing your object into the database, the best way.