Data Types

Python 3

Python parameters sent to the database

The following table describes how Python objects passed to Cursor.execute() as parameters are formatted and passed to the driver/database.

Description	Python Datatype	ODBC Datatype
null	None	varies (1)
boolean	bool	BIT
integer	int	SQL_BIGINT
floating point	float	SQL_DOUBLE
decimal	decimal.Decimal	SQL_NUMERIC
string	str	SQL_VARCHAR or SQL_LONGVARCHAR (2)(3)
binary	bytes, bytearray	SQL_VARBINARY or SQL_LONGVARBINARY (3)
date	datetime.date	SQL_TYPE_DATE
time	datetime.time	SQL_TYPE_TIME
timestamp	datetime.datetime	SQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP
UUID / GUID	uuid.UUID	SQL_GUID

1. If the driver supports it, SQLDescribeParam is used to determine the appropriate type. If it is not supported, SQL_VARCHAR is used.
2. The encoding and ODBC data type can be changed using Connection.setencoding(). See the Unicode page for more information.
3. SQLGetTypeInfo is used to determine when the LONG types are used. If it is not supported, 1MB is used.

SQL values received from the database

The following table describes how database results are converted to Python objects.

Description	ODBC Datatype	Python Datatype
NULL	any	None
bit	SQL_BIT	bool
integers	SQL_TINYINT, SQL_SMALLINT, SQL_INTEGER, SQL_BIGINT	int
floating point	SQL_REAL, SQL_FLOAT, SQL_DOUBLE	float
decimal, numeric	SQL_DECIMAL, SQL_NUMERIC	decimal.Decimal
1-byte text	SQL_CHAR	str via UTF-8 (1)
2-byte text	SQL_WCHAR	str via UTF-16LE (1)
binary	SQL_BINARY, SQL_VARBINARY	bytes
date	SQL_TYPE_DATE	datetime.date
time	SQL_TYPE_TIME	datetime.time
SQL Server time	SQL_SS_TIME2	datetime.time
timestamp	SQL_TIMESTAMP	datetime.datetime
UUID / GUID	SQL_GUID	str or uuid.UUID (2)
XML	SQL_XML	str via UTF-16LE (1)

1. The encoding can be changed using Connection.setdecoding(). See the Unicode page for more information.
2. The default is str. Setting pyodbc.native_uuid to True will cause them to be returned as uuid.UUID objects.

Python 2

Python parameters sent to the database

Description	Python Datatype	ODBC Datatype
null	None	varies (1)
boolean	bool	BIT
4-byte integer	int	SQL_INTEGER
long integer	long	SQL_BIGINT
floating point	float	SQL_DOUBLE
decimal	decimal.Decimal	SQL_NUMERIC
UTF-8 (2)	str	SQL_CHAR (2)
UTF-16LE (2)	unicode	SQL_WCHAR (2)
binary	bytearray	SQL_VARBINARY or SQL_LONGVARBINARY (3)
binary	buffer	SQL_VARBINARY or SQL_LONGVARBINARY (3)
date	datetime.date	SQL_TYPE_DATE
time	datetime.time	SQL_TYPE_TIME
timestamp	datetime.datetime	SQL_TIMESTAMP
UUID / GUID	uuid.UUID	SQL_GUID

1. If the driver supports it, SQLDescribeParam is used to determine the appropriate type. If it is not supported, SQL_VARCHAR is used.
2. The encoding and ODBC data type can be changed using Connection.setencoding(). See the Unicode page for more information.
3. SQLGetTypeInfo is used to determine when the LONG types are used. If it is not supported, 1MB is used.

SQL values received from the database

The following table describes how database results are converted to Python objects.

Description	ODBC Datatype	Python Datatype
NULL	any	None
bit	SQL_BIT	bool
integers	SQL_TINYINT, SQL_SMALLINT, SQL_INTEGER, SQL_BIGINT	long
floating point	SQL_REAL, SQL_FLOAT, SQL_DOUBLE	float
decimal, numeric	SQL_DECIMAL, SQL_NUMERIC	decimal.Decimal
1-byte text	SQL_CHAR	unicode via UTF-8 (1)
2-byte text	SQL_WCHAR	unicode via UTF-16LE (1)
binary	SQL_BINARY, SQL_VARBINARY	bytearray
date	SQL_TYPE_DATE	datetime.date
time	SQL_TYPE_TIME	datetime.time
SQL Server time	SQL_SS_TIME2	datetime.time
timestamp	SQL_TIMESTAMP	datetime.datetime
UUID / GUID	SQL_GUID	unicode or uuid.UUID (2)
XML	SQL_XML	unicode

1. The encoding and the Python type can be changed using Connection.setdecoding(). See the Unicode page for more information.
2. The default is unicode. Setting pyodbc.native_uuid to True will cause them to be returned as uuid.UUID objects.

Note that these are pyodbc 4.x data types. Earlier versions returned str objects for SQL_CHAR buffers and performed no decoding. SQL_WCHAR buffers were assumed to be UCS-2.