Do you, like me, pull out your hair and get the almost irresistible urge to murder small cute things when forced to use Python’s DB-API? Despite being under development for many years it seems to be half-baked at best.

One such idiocy would be the utter lack of dictionary support, the ability that pretty much every other database abstraction layer since, well…forever, has had to allow you to address the columns by name. E.g., print row['firstName'].

The mysql driver allows it, but you have to CLOSE your cursor and open it in dictionary mode. Pardon my explosive interjection here, but WTF?

I’ve written a dinky little wrapper that allows you to use dictionaries in your project:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self, ...):
        self.conn = pgdb.connect(...)
        self.cursor = self.conn.cursor()
        self.cursor.fetchoneAssoc = self.fetchoneAssoc
        self.cursor.fetchallAssoc = self.fetchallAssoc

    ## helper functions to make DB-API less braindead
    #
    def fetchoneAssoc(self):
        row = self.cursor.fetchone()
        if row is None: return None
        cols = [ d[0] for d in self.cursor.description ]
        return dict(zip(cols, row))

    def fetchallAssoc(self):
        results = self.cursor.fetchall()
        if results is None: return None
        cols = [ d[0] for d in self.cursor.description ]
        ret = []
        for row in results:
            ret.append(dict(zip(cols, row)))
        return ret

Just stick that in your class definition (obviously substituting the name of the DB-API driver you’re using), and call it just like you would a .fetchall().

results = self.cursor.fetchallAssoc()

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go find a kitten. This is just too much.