expiringsqlitedict

Persistent compressed expiring dict in Python, backed up by sqlite3 and json


License
Apache-2.0
Install
pip install expiringsqlitedict==1.2.0

Documentation

expiringsqlitedict -- expiring file-backed dict

A lightweight wrapper around Python's sqlite3 database with a MutableMapping interface:

from expiringsqlitedict import SqliteDict
with SqliteDict('./my_db.sqlite') as mydict:
    mydict['some_key'] = any_picklable_object
    print(mydict['some_key'])  # prints the new value
    for key, value in mydict.items():
        print((key, value))
    print(len(mydict)) # etc... all dict functions work

json is used internally by default to serialize the values. Keys are arbitrary strings, values arbitrary json-able objects. This must be used within a context manager, and serialization can be overridden with your own. The database is wrapped with a transaction, and any exception thrown out of the context manager rolls back all changes.

This was forked off of sqlitedict in order to add auto-expiring functionality, and initially was quite similar to it. Version 2.0 split of completely and takes the module into a complete rewrite, mostly to remove unnecessary Python 2 compatibility, simplify the API, completely enforce a context manager for typical cases, add full typing throughout, and use sqlite triggers for expiration cleanup.

Version 3 set the default encoding to json, and made many other API refinements.

This version also does not vacuum at all automatically. It did in previous versions, but this was kind of a silly behavior to put into the library itself. If you want your database file intermittently vacuumed, you should put such behavior into a crontab or use the sqlite3 module to do it yourself intermittently.

Features

  • Values can be any json-capable objects (this can be customized to be as flexible as you need, through custom serializers)
  • Support for access from multiple programs or threads, with locking fully managed by sqlite itself.
  • A very simple codebase that is easy to read, relying on sqlite for as much behavior as possible.
  • A simple autocommit wrapper (SimpleSqliteDict), if you really can't handle a context manager and need something that fully handles like a dict. You can specify a isolation_level on this to have to commit and roll back yourself.
  • An on-demand wrapper (OnDemand), for situations where you want to open and close the database in as narrow a window as possible.
  • Support for custom serialization or compression:
import orjson
  
with SqliteDict('some.db', serializer=orjson) as mydict:
    mydict['some_key'] = some_json_encodable_object
    print(mydict['some_key'])

Installation

The module has no dependencies beyond Python itself.

Install with pip as usual:

pip install expiringsqlitedict

Testing

You may test this by running test.py with PYTHONPATH set to the current working directory. There is a convenience justfile to do this for you when you run:

just test

This will run all tests against all supported versions of Python (and 3.6), as well as all supported versions of Alpine, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu Linux.

Documentation

Documentation is available on readthedocs

Standard Python document strings are inside the module

>>> import expiringsqlitedict
>>> help(expiringsqlitedict)

Comments, bug reports

expiringsqlitedict resides on github. You can file issues or pull requests there.


expiringsqlitedict is open source software released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 All versions copyright (c) 2018-2023 Absolute Performance, Inc.