phoenixdb is a Python library for accessing the Phoenix SQL database using the remote query server introduced in Phoenix 4.4. The library implements the standard DB API 2.0 interface, which should be familiar to most Python programmers.

The easiest way to install the library is using pip:

pip install phoenixdb

You can also download the source code from Bitbucket, extract the archive and then install it manually:

cd /path/to/python-phoenix-x.y.z/
python setup.py install

The library implements the standard DB API 2.0 interface, so it can be used the same way you would use any other SQL database from Python, for example:

import phoenixdb

database_url = 'http://localhost:8765/'
conn = phoenixdb.connect(database_url, autocommit=True)

cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE users (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, username VARCHAR)")
cursor.execute("UPSERT INTO users VALUES (?, ?)", (1, 'admin'))
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM users")
print cursor.fetchall()

If you want to quickly try out the included examples, you can set up a local virtualenv with all the necessary requirements:

virtualenv e
source e/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py develop

If you need a Phoenix server for experimenting, you can get one running quickly using Vagrant:

vagrant up

You can connect to the virtual machine and work with the Phoenix shell from there:

vagrant ssh
/opt/phoenix/bin/sqlline.py localhost

There is a Python-based interactive shell include in the examples folder, which can be used to connect to Phoenix and execute queries:

./examples/shell.py http://localhost:8765/
db=> CREATE TABLE test (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR);
no rows affected (1.363 seconds)
db=> UPSERT INTO test (id, name) VALUES (1, 'Lukas');
1 row affected (0.004 seconds)
db=> SELECT * FROM test;
+------+-------+
|   ID | NAME  |
+======+=======+
|    1 | Lukas |
+------+-------+
1 row selected (0.019 seconds)

The library comes with a test suite for testing Python DB API 2.0 compliance and various Phoenix-specific features. In order to run the test suite, you need a working Phoenix database and set the PHOENIXDB_TEST_DB_URL environment variable:

export PHOENIXDB_TEST_DB_URL='http://localhost:8765/'
nosetests

• In general, the library has not been battle-tested yet. You might encounter almost any problem. Use with care.
• You can only use the library in autocommit mode. The native Java Phoenix library also implements batched upserts, which can be committed at once, but this is not exposed over the remote server. (CALCITE-767)
• In some cases, generic exceptions are raises, instead of more specific SQL errors. This is because the Avatica server from Calcite currently does not pass errors in a structured format.
• DECIMAL data type do not work properly with Phoenix 4.6, which ships with Calcite 1.3. You can use them if you make a custom build of Phoenix with a more recent version of Calcite. (CALCITE-795)
• Requests with more than 16k data will fail on Phoenix 4.6. (CALCITE-780)
• TIME and DATE columns in Phoenix are stored as full timestamps with a millisecond accuracy, but the remote protocol only exposes the time (hour/minute/second) or date (year/month/day) parts of the columns. (CALCITE-797, CALCITE-798)
• TIMESTAMP columns in Phoenix are stored with a nanosecond accuracy, but the remote protocol truncates them to milliseconds. (CALCITE-796)