Database Drivers in Python

For PostgreSQL, psycopg (version 3, the successor to psycopg2) supports both sync and async code and is what most frameworks use by default. asyncpg is async-only and implements the PostgreSQL binary protocol directly, which makes it fast for asyncio services. pgvector adds vector types and similarity operators to these drivers and to SQLAlchemy. For MySQL and MariaDB, mysqlclient is a C extension that needs the client libraries installed, and PyMySQL is pure Python, slower but easy to install anywhere.

SQLite ships with Python as the sqlite3 module. APSW exposes the complete SQLite API for when you need features sqlite3 does not wrap, and sqlite-utils is a CLI and library for creating and transforming SQLite databases. ClickHouse has the official clickhouse-connect, which uses the HTTP interface, and clickhouse-driver, which speaks the native protocol. For enterprise databases, oracledb runs without Oracle Client libraries in its default thin mode, mssql-python is Microsoft's official SQL Server driver, and pyodbc reaches any ODBC source. redis-py, PyMongo and the Cassandra driver cover the main NoSQL stores.