Python DB-API 'type_code' Values

The Python DB-API specifies seven cursor attributes, the second of which is a type_code that should describe the data type of the column.  The DB-API specifies a set of type objects that should be used for the type_code value.  However, different DBMSs report various types of values for the type codes.  The type of information provided as the type_code by several different DBMSs, for several common data types, is shown in the following table.

Data Type	Postgres	MariaDB	SQL Server	Firebird	MS-Access	SQLite
Timestamp with time zone	1184
Timestamp	1184	7		type 'datetime.datetime'		None
Datetime		12	class 'datetime.datetime'		class 'datetime.datetime'	None
Date	1082	10	class 'datetime.date'	type 'datetime.date'	class 'datetime.datetime'	None
Time	1083	11	class 'datetime.time'	type 'datetime.time'	class 'datetime.datetime'	None
Boolean	16	16	class 'bool'		class 'bool'
Small integer	21	1	class 'int'		class 'int'
Integer	23	2	class 'int'	type 'int'	class 'int'	None
Long integer	20	3	class 'int'	type 'long'		None
Single	701	4	class 'float'	type 'float'	class 'float'	None
Double precision	701	5	class 'float'	type 'float'	class 'float'	None
Decimal	1700	0	class 'decimal.Decimal'	class 'decimal.Decimal'		None
Currency	790			class 'decimal.Decimal'	class 'decimal.Decimal'
Character	1042		class 'str'	type 'str'	class 'str'	None
Character varying	1043	15	class 'str'	type 'str'	class 'str'	None
Text	25		class 'str'	type 'str'	class 'str'	None
Binary / BLOB	17	249,250,251,252	class 'bytearray'	type 'str'	type 'bytearray'	None

The Python data types are for Python 2; for Python 3, the 'long' data type will be 'int' instead.

The following libraries were used to connect to the DBMSs:

• Postgres: psycopg2
• MariaDB: pymysql
• SQL Server: pyodbc
• Firebird: fdb
• MS-Access: pyodbc
• SQLite: sqlite3

The integer type_code values used by Postgres are the same as those in the pg_types system table, except for single-precision floating point and character data types, for which the pg_types values are 700 and 8, respectively.