11.13.1. Module functions and constants

sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES

This constant is meant to be used with the detect_types parameter of the connect() function.

Setting it makes the sqlite3 module parse the declared type for each column it returns. It will parse out the first word of the declared type, i. e. for “integer primary key”, it will parse out “integer”, or for “number(10)” it will parse out “number”. Then for that column, it will look into the converters dictionary and use the converter function registered for that type there.

sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES

This constant is meant to be used with the detect_types parameter of the connect() function.

Setting this makes the SQLite interface parse the column name for each column it returns. It will look for a string formed [mytype] in there, and then decide that ‘mytype’ is the type of the column. It will try to find an entry of ‘mytype’ in the converters dictionary and then use the converter function found there to return the value. The column name found in Cursor.description is only the first word of the column name, i. e. if you use something like 'as "x [datetime]"' in your SQL, then we will parse out everything until the first blank for the column name: the column name would simply be “x”.

sqlite3.connect(database[, timeout, detect_types, isolation_level, check_same_thread, factory, cached_statements])

Opens a connection to the SQLite database file database. You can use ":memory:" to open a database connection to a database that resides in RAM instead of on disk.

When a database is accessed by multiple connections, and one of the processes modifies the database, the SQLite database is locked until that transaction is committed. The timeout parameter specifies how long the connection should wait for the lock to go away until raising an exception. The default for the timeout parameter is 5.0 (five seconds).

For the isolation_level parameter, please see the Connection.isolation_level property of Connection objects.

SQLite natively supports only the types TEXT, INTEGER, FLOAT, BLOB and NULL. If you want to use other types you must add support for them yourself. The detect_types parameter and the using custom converters registered with the module-level register_converter() function allow you to easily do that.

detect_types defaults to 0 (i. e. off, no type detection), you can set it to any combination of PARSE_DECLTYPES and PARSE_COLNAMES to turn type detection on.

By default, the sqlite3 module uses its Connection class for the connect call. You can, however, subclass the Connection class and make connect() use your class instead by providing your class for the factory parameter.

Consult the section SQLite and Python types of this manual for details.

The sqlite3 module internally uses a statement cache to avoid SQL parsing overhead. If you want to explicitly set the number of statements that are cached for the connection, you can set the cached_statements parameter. The currently implemented default is to cache 100 statements.

sqlite3.register_converter(typename, callable)

Registers a callable to convert a bytestring from the database into a custom Python type. The callable will be invoked for all database values that are of the type typename. Confer the parameter detect_types of the connect() function for how the type detection works. Note that the case of typename and the name of the type in your query must match!

sqlite3.register_adapter(type, callable)

Registers a callable to convert the custom Python type type into one of SQLite’s supported types. The callable callable accepts as single parameter the Python value, and must return a value of the following types: int, long, float, str (UTF-8 encoded), unicode or buffer.

sqlite3.complete_statement(sql)

Returns True if the string sql contains one or more complete SQL statements terminated by semicolons. It does not verify that the SQL is syntactically correct, only that there are no unclosed string literals and the statement is terminated by a semicolon.

This can be used to build a shell for SQLite, as in the following example:

# A minimal SQLite shell for experiments

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.isolation_level = None
cur = con.cursor()

buffer = ""

print "Enter your SQL commands to execute in sqlite3."
print "Enter a blank line to exit."

while True:
    line = raw_input()
    if line == "":
        break
    buffer += line
    if sqlite3.complete_statement(buffer):
        try:
            buffer = buffer.strip()
            cur.execute(buffer)

            if buffer.lstrip().upper().startswith("SELECT"):
                print cur.fetchall()
        except sqlite3.Error, e:
            print "An error occurred:", e.args[0]
        buffer = ""

con.close()

sqlite3.enable_callback_tracebacks(flag)

By default you will not get any tracebacks in user-defined functions, aggregates, converters, authorizer callbacks etc. If you want to debug them, you can call this function with flag as True. Afterwards, you will get tracebacks from callbacks on sys.stderr. Use False to disable the feature again.

11.13.2. Connection Objects

class sqlite3.Connection

A SQLite database connection has the following attributes and methods:

Connection.isolation_level

Get or set the current isolation level. None for autocommit mode or one of “DEFERRED”, “IMMEDIATE” or “EXCLUSIVE”. See section Controlling Transactions for a more detailed explanation.

Connection.cursor([cursorClass])

The cursor method accepts a single optional parameter cursorClass. If supplied, this must be a custom cursor class that extends sqlite3.Cursor.

Connection.commit()

This method commits the current transaction. If you don’t call this method, anything you did since the last call to commit() is not visible from from other database connections. If you wonder why you don’t see the data you’ve written to the database, please check you didn’t forget to call this method.

Connection.rollback()

This method rolls back any changes to the database since the last call to commit().

Connection.close()

This closes the database connection. Note that this does not automatically call commit(). If you just close your database connection without calling commit() first, your changes will be lost!

Connection.execute(sql[, parameters])

This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates an intermediate cursor object by calling the cursor method, then calls the cursor’s execute method with the parameters given.

Connection.executemany(sql[, parameters])

This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates an intermediate cursor object by calling the cursor method, then calls the cursor’s executemany method with the parameters given.

Connection.executescript(sql_script)

This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates an intermediate cursor object by calling the cursor method, then calls the cursor’s executescript method with the parameters given.

Connection.create_function(name, num_params, func)

Creates a user-defined function that you can later use from within SQL statements under the function name name. num_params is the number of parameters the function accepts, and func is a Python callable that is called as the SQL function.

The function can return any of the types supported by SQLite: unicode, str, int, long, float, buffer and None.

Example:

import sqlite3
import md5

def md5sum(t):
    return md5.md5(t).hexdigest()

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_function("md5", 1, md5sum)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select md5(?)", ("foo",))
print cur.fetchone()[0]

Connection.create_aggregate(name, num_params, aggregate_class)

Creates a user-defined aggregate function.

The aggregate class must implement a step method, which accepts the number of parameters num_params, and a finalize method which will return the final result of the aggregate.

The finalize method can return any of the types supported by SQLite: unicode, str, int, long, float, buffer and None.

Example:

import sqlite3

class MySum:
    def __init__(self):
        self.count = 0

    def step(self, value):
        self.count += value

    def finalize(self):
        return self.count

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_aggregate("mysum", 1, MySum)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(i)")
cur.execute("insert into test(i) values (1)")
cur.execute("insert into test(i) values (2)")
cur.execute("select mysum(i) from test")
print cur.fetchone()[0]

Connection.create_collation(name, callable)

Creates a collation with the specified name and callable. The callable will be passed two string arguments. It should return -1 if the first is ordered lower than the second, 0 if they are ordered equal and 1 if the first is ordered higher than the second. Note that this controls sorting (ORDER BY in SQL) so your comparisons don’t affect other SQL operations.

Note that the callable will get its parameters as Python bytestrings, which will normally be encoded in UTF-8.

The following example shows a custom collation that sorts “the wrong way”:

import sqlite3

def collate_reverse(string1, string2):
    return -cmp(string1, string2)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_collation("reverse", collate_reverse)

cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(x)")
cur.executemany("insert into test(x) values (?)", [("a",), ("b",)])
cur.execute("select x from test order by x collate reverse")
for row in cur:
    print row
con.close()

To remove a collation, call create_collation with None as callable:

con.create_collation("reverse", None)

Connection.interrupt()

You can call this method from a different thread to abort any queries that might be executing on the connection. The query will then abort and the caller will get an exception.

Connection.set_authorizer(authorizer_callback)

This routine registers a callback. The callback is invoked for each attempt to access a column of a table in the database. The callback should return SQLITE_OK if access is allowed, SQLITE_DENY if the entire SQL statement should be aborted with an error and SQLITE_IGNORE if the column should be treated as a NULL value. These constants are available in the sqlite3 module.

The first argument to the callback signifies what kind of operation is to be authorized. The second and third argument will be arguments or None depending on the first argument. The 4th argument is the name of the database (“main”, “temp”, etc.) if applicable. The 5th argument is the name of the inner-most trigger or view that is responsible for the access attempt or None if this access attempt is directly from input SQL code.

Please consult the SQLite documentation about the possible values for the first argument and the meaning of the second and third argument depending on the first one. All necessary constants are available in the sqlite3 module.

Connection.set_progress_handler(handler, n)

New in version 2.6.

This routine registers a callback. The callback is invoked for every n instructions of the SQLite virtual machine. This is useful if you want to get called from SQLite during long-running operations, for example to update a GUI.

If you want to clear any previously installed progress handler, call the method with None for handler.

Connection.enable_load_extension(enabled)

New in version 2.7.

This routine allows/disallows the SQLite engine to load SQLite extensions from shared libraries. SQLite extensions can define new functions, aggregates or whole new virtual table implementations. One well-known extension is the fulltext-search extension distributed with SQLite.

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")

# enable extension loading
con.enable_load_extension(True)

# Load the fulltext search extension
con.execute("select load_extension('./fts3.so')")

# alternatively you can load the extension using an API call:
# con.load_extension("./fts3.so")

# disable extension laoding again
con.enable_load_extension(False)

# example from SQLite wiki
con.execute("create virtual table recipe using fts3(name, ingredients)")
con.executescript("""
    insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('broccoli stew', 'broccoli peppers cheese tomatoes');
    insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('pumpkin stew', 'pumpkin onions garlic celery');
    insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('broccoli pie', 'broccoli cheese onions flour');
    insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('pumpkin pie', 'pumpkin sugar flour butter');
    """)
for row in con.execute("select rowid, name, ingredients from recipe where name match 'pie'"):
    print row

Connection.load_extension(path)

New in version 2.7.

This routine loads a SQLite extension from a shared library. You have to enable extension loading with enable_load_extension() before you can use this routine.

Connection.row_factory

You can change this attribute to a callable that accepts the cursor and the original row as a tuple and will return the real result row. This way, you can implement more advanced ways of returning results, such as returning an object that can also access columns by name.

Example:

import sqlite3

def dict_factory(cursor, row):
    d = {}
    for idx, col in enumerate(cursor.description):
        d[col[0]] = row[idx]
    return d

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.row_factory = dict_factory
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select 1 as a")
print cur.fetchone()["a"]

If returning a tuple doesn’t suffice and you want name-based access to columns, you should consider setting row_factory to the highly-optimized sqlite3.Row type. Row provides both index-based and case-insensitive name-based access to columns with almost no memory overhead. It will probably be better than your own custom dictionary-based approach or even a db_row based solution.

Connection.text_factory

Using this attribute you can control what objects are returned for the TEXT data type. By default, this attribute is set to unicode and the sqlite3 module will return Unicode objects for TEXT. If you want to return bytestrings instead, you can set it to str.

For efficiency reasons, there’s also a way to return Unicode objects only for non-ASCII data, and bytestrings otherwise. To activate it, set this attribute to sqlite3.OptimizedUnicode.

You can also set it to any other callable that accepts a single bytestring parameter and returns the resulting object.

See the following example code for illustration:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

# Create the table
con.execute("create table person(lastname, firstname)")

AUSTRIA = u"\xd6sterreich"

# by default, rows are returned as Unicode
cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert row[0] == AUSTRIA

# but we can make sqlite3 always return bytestrings ...
con.text_factory = str
cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert type(row[0]) == str
# the bytestrings will be encoded in UTF-8, unless you stored garbage in the
# database ...
assert row[0] == AUSTRIA.encode("utf-8")

# we can also implement a custom text_factory ...
# here we implement one that will ignore Unicode characters that cannot be
# decoded from UTF-8
con.text_factory = lambda x: unicode(x, "utf-8", "ignore")
cur.execute("select ?", ("this is latin1 and would normally create errors" +
                         u"\xe4\xf6\xfc".encode("latin1"),))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert type(row[0]) == unicode

# sqlite3 offers a built-in optimized text_factory that will return bytestring
# objects, if the data is in ASCII only, and otherwise return unicode objects
con.text_factory = sqlite3.OptimizedUnicode
cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert type(row[0]) == unicode

cur.execute("select ?", ("Germany",))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert type(row[0]) == str

Connection.total_changes

Returns the total number of database rows that have been modified, inserted, or deleted since the database connection was opened.

Connection.iterdump

Returns an iterator to dump the database in an SQL text format. Useful when saving an in-memory database for later restoration. This function provides the same capabilities as the .dump command in the sqlite3 shell.

New in version 2.6.

Example:

# Convert file existing_db.db to SQL dump file dump.sql
import sqlite3, os

con = sqlite3.connect('existing_db.db')
with open('dump.sql', 'w') as f:
    for line in con.iterdump():
        f.write('%s\n' % line)

11.13.3. Cursor Objects

class sqlite3.Cursor

A Cursor instance has the following attributes and methods.

Cursor.execute(sql[, parameters])

Executes an SQL statement. The SQL statement may be parametrized (i. e. placeholders instead of SQL literals). The sqlite3 module supports two kinds of placeholders: question marks (qmark style) and named placeholders (named style).

This example shows how to use parameters with qmark style:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect("mydb")

cur = con.cursor()

who = "Yeltsin"
age = 72

cur.execute("select name_last, age from people where name_last=? and age=?", (who, age))
print cur.fetchone()

This example shows how to use the named style:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect("mydb")

cur = con.cursor()

who = "Yeltsin"
age = 72

cur.execute("select name_last, age from people where name_last=:who and age=:age",
    {"who": who, "age": age})
print cur.fetchone()

execute() will only execute a single SQL statement. If you try to execute more than one statement with it, it will raise a Warning. Use executescript() if you want to execute multiple SQL statements with one call.

Cursor.executemany(sql, seq_of_parameters)

Executes an SQL command against all parameter sequences or mappings found in the sequence sql. The sqlite3 module also allows using an iterator yielding parameters instead of a sequence.

import sqlite3

class IterChars:
    def __init__(self):
        self.count = ord('a')

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    def next(self):
        if self.count > ord('z'):
            raise StopIteration
        self.count += 1
        return (chr(self.count - 1),) # this is a 1-tuple

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table characters(c)")

theIter = IterChars()
cur.executemany("insert into characters(c) values (?)", theIter)

cur.execute("select c from characters")
print cur.fetchall()

Here’s a shorter example using a generator:

import sqlite3

def char_generator():
    import string
    for c in string.letters[:26]:
        yield (c,)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table characters(c)")

cur.executemany("insert into characters(c) values (?)", char_generator())

cur.execute("select c from characters")
print cur.fetchall()

Cursor.executescript(sql_script)

This is a nonstandard convenience method for executing multiple SQL statements at once. It issues a COMMIT statement first, then executes the SQL script it gets as a parameter.

sql_script can be a bytestring or a Unicode string.

Example:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.executescript("""
    create table person(
        firstname,
        lastname,
        age
    );

    create table book(
        title,
        author,
        published
    );

    insert into book(title, author, published)
    values (
        'Dirk Gently''s Holistic Detective Agency',
        'Douglas Adams',
        1987
    );
    """)

Cursor.fetchone()

Fetches the next row of a query result set, returning a single sequence, or None when no more data is available.

Cursor.fetchmany([size=cursor.arraysize])

Fetches the next set of rows of a query result, returning a list. An empty list is returned when no more rows are available.

The number of rows to fetch per call is specified by the size parameter. If it is not given, the cursor’s arraysize determines the number of rows to be fetched. The method should try to fetch as many rows as indicated by the size parameter. If this is not possible due to the specified number of rows not being available, fewer rows may be returned.

Note there are performance considerations involved with the size parameter. For optimal performance, it is usually best to use the arraysize attribute. If the size parameter is used, then it is best for it to retain the same value from one fetchmany() call to the next.

Cursor.fetchall()

Fetches all (remaining) rows of a query result, returning a list. Note that the cursor’s arraysize attribute can affect the performance of this operation. An empty list is returned when no rows are available.

Cursor.rowcount

Although the Cursor class of the sqlite3 module implements this attribute, the database engine’s own support for the determination of “rows affected”/”rows selected” is quirky.

For DELETE statements, SQLite reports rowcount as 0 if you make a DELETE FROM table without any condition.

For executemany() statements, the number of modifications are summed up into rowcount.

As required by the Python DB API Spec, the rowcount attribute “is -1 in case no executeXX() has been performed on the cursor or the rowcount of the last operation is not determinable by the interface”.

This includes SELECT statements because we cannot determine the number of rows a query produced until all rows were fetched.

Cursor.lastrowid

This read-only attribute provides the rowid of the last modified row. It is only set if you issued a INSERT statement using the execute() method. For operations other than INSERT or when executemany() is called, lastrowid is set to None.

Cursor.description

This read-only attribute provides the column names of the last query. To remain compatible with the Python DB API, it returns a 7-tuple for each column where the last six items of each tuple are None.

It is set for SELECT statements without any matching rows as well.

11.13.4. Row Objects

class sqlite3.Row

A Row instance serves as a highly optimized row_factory for Connection objects. It tries to mimic a tuple in most of its features.

It supports mapping access by column name and index, iteration, representation, equality testing and len().

If two Row objects have exactly the same columns and their members are equal, they compare equal.

Changed in version 2.6: Added iteration and equality (hashability).

keys()

This method returns a tuple of column names. Immediately after a query, it is the first member of each tuple in Cursor.description.

New in version 2.6.

Let’s assume we initialize a table as in the example given above:

conn = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
c = conn.cursor()
c.execute('''create table stocks
(date text, trans text, symbol text,
 qty real, price real)''')
c.execute("""insert into stocks
          values ('2006-01-05','BUY','RHAT',100,35.14)""")
conn.commit()
c.close()

Now we plug Row in:

>>> conn.row_factory = sqlite3.Row
>>> c = conn.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select * from stocks')
<sqlite3.Cursor object at 0x7f4e7dd8fa80>
>>> r = c.fetchone()
>>> type(r)
<type 'sqlite3.Row'>
>>> r
(u'2006-01-05', u'BUY', u'RHAT', 100.0, 35.14)
>>> len(r)
5
>>> r[2]
u'RHAT'
>>> r.keys()
['date', 'trans', 'symbol', 'qty', 'price']
>>> r['qty']
100.0
>>> for member in r: print member
...
2006-01-05
BUY
RHAT
100.0
35.14

11.13.5. SQLite and Python types

class Point(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x, self.y = x, y

import sqlite3

class Point(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x, self.y = x, y

    def __conform__(self, protocol):
        if protocol is sqlite3.PrepareProtocol:
            return "%f;%f" % (self.x, self.y)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)
cur.execute("select ?", (p,))
print cur.fetchone()[0]

import sqlite3

class Point(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x, self.y = x, y

def adapt_point(point):
    return "%f;%f" % (point.x, point.y)

sqlite3.register_adapter(Point, adapt_point)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)
cur.execute("select ?", (p,))
print cur.fetchone()[0]

import sqlite3
import datetime, time

def adapt_datetime(ts):
    return time.mktime(ts.timetuple())

sqlite3.register_adapter(datetime.datetime, adapt_datetime)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

now = datetime.datetime.now()
cur.execute("select ?", (now,))
print cur.fetchone()[0]

def convert_point(s):
    x, y = map(float, s.split(";"))
    return Point(x, y)

import sqlite3

class Point(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x, self.y = x, y

    def __repr__(self):
        return "(%f;%f)" % (self.x, self.y)

def adapt_point(point):
    return "%f;%f" % (point.x, point.y)

def convert_point(s):
    x, y = map(float, s.split(";"))
    return Point(x, y)

# Register the adapter
sqlite3.register_adapter(Point, adapt_point)

# Register the converter
sqlite3.register_converter("point", convert_point)

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)

#########################
# 1) Using declared types
con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(p point)")

cur.execute("insert into test(p) values (?)", (p,))
cur.execute("select p from test")
print "with declared types:", cur.fetchone()[0]
cur.close()
con.close()

#######################
# 1) Using column names
con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(p)")

cur.execute("insert into test(p) values (?)", (p,))
cur.execute('select p as "p [point]" from test')
print "with column names:", cur.fetchone()[0]
cur.close()
con.close()

import sqlite3
import datetime

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES|sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(d date, ts timestamp)")

today = datetime.date.today()
now = datetime.datetime.now()

cur.execute("insert into test(d, ts) values (?, ?)", (today, now))
cur.execute("select d, ts from test")
row = cur.fetchone()
print today, "=>", row[0], type(row[0])
print now, "=>", row[1], type(row[1])

cur.execute('select current_date as "d [date]", current_timestamp as "ts [timestamp]"')
row = cur.fetchone()
print "current_date", row[0], type(row[0])
print "current_timestamp", row[1], type(row[1])

11.13.6. Controlling Transactions

By default, the sqlite3 module opens transactions implicitly before a Data Modification Language (DML) statement (i.e. INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/REPLACE), and commits transactions implicitly before a non-DML, non-query statement (i. e. anything other than SELECT or the aforementioned).

So if you are within a transaction and issue a command like CREATE TABLE ..., VACUUM, PRAGMA, the sqlite3 module will commit implicitly before executing that command. There are two reasons for doing that. The first is that some of these commands don’t work within transactions. The other reason is that sqlite3 needs to keep track of the transaction state (if a transaction is active or not).

You can control which kind of BEGIN statements sqlite3 implicitly executes (or none at all) via the isolation_level parameter to the connect() call, or via the isolation_level property of connections.

If you want autocommit mode, then set isolation_level to None.

Otherwise leave it at its default, which will result in a plain “BEGIN” statement, or set it to one of SQLite’s supported isolation levels: “DEFERRED”, “IMMEDIATE” or “EXCLUSIVE”.

11.13.7. Using sqlite3 efficiently

import sqlite3

persons = [
    ("Hugo", "Boss"),
    ("Calvin", "Klein")
    ]

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")

# Create the table
con.execute("create table person(firstname, lastname)")

# Fill the table
con.executemany("insert into person(firstname, lastname) values (?, ?)", persons)

# Print the table contents
for row in con.execute("select firstname, lastname from person"):
    print row

# Using a dummy WHERE clause to not let SQLite take the shortcut table deletes.
print "I just deleted", con.execute("delete from person where 1=1").rowcount, "rows"

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect("mydb")
con.row_factory = sqlite3.Row

cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select name_last, age from people")
for row in cur:
    assert row[0] == row["name_last"]
    assert row["name_last"] == row["nAmE_lAsT"]
    assert row[1] == row["age"]
    assert row[1] == row["AgE"]

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.execute("create table person (id integer primary key, firstname varchar unique)")

# Successful, con.commit() is called automatically afterwards
with con:
    con.execute("insert into person(firstname) values (?)", ("Joe",))

# con.rollback() is called after the with block finishes with an exception, the
# exception is still raised and must be catched
try:
    with con:
        con.execute("insert into person(firstname) values (?)", ("Joe",))
except sqlite3.IntegrityError:
    print "couldn't add Joe twice"

11.13.8. Common issues