How to count number of records in an SQL database with python

Question

I can't seem to print the number of records in my database:
When I program:

cursor = cnxn.cursor()   
count = cursor.execute("select count(*) from fixtures")  
cursor.commit  
print (count)

(fixtures is the name of my database)
I get:

pyodbc.Cursor object at 0x00000000032FC150  

...rather than the number of records.

I am using pyodbc module on python

Answer 1

For pyodbc, cursor.execute() returns the cursor object itself . You still need to retrieve the results separately.

You could loop over the cursor to get rows; list() can do the looping for you and pull in all rows into a list object:

cursor.execute("select count(*) from fixtures")  
print(list(cursor))

or you can call cursor.fetchall() .

For a result set with just one row, you could use:

cursor.execute("select count(*) from fixtures")
result = cursor.fetchone()

cursor.fetchone() returns either one row, or None if there are no results at all.

In all cases rows are sequences of columns, for a one-column result that'll be a tuple with just one value in it.

In your example query, you are fetching a single row, with a single column, so you can get that single value with cursor.fetchone() then using indexing or tuple assignment, eg

cursor.execute("select count(*) from fixtures")
fixture_count = cursor.fetchone()[0]

or

cursor.execute("select count(*) from fixtures")
fixture_count, = cursor.fetchone()

You don't need to commit after a SELECT , but you didn't actually call the commit() method either, you are missing the () part. If you are altering data, do remember to use cursor.commit() . Note that cursor.commit() does exactly the same thing as cnxn.commit() ; transactions are managed per connection, not per cursor.

However, when not using autocommit , it is easier and better to use the connection as a context manager to ensure a transaction is aborted or committed based on there being any exceptions:

with cnxn:
    # anything in this block is handled with a transaction.

# after the block the transaction is committed, unless there was an exception.

Answer 2

cursor.execute("SELECT COUNT (*) FROM fixtures")
rowcount = cursor.fetchone()[0]

print (rowcount)

Answer 3

This worked for me:

tempvar = cursor.fetchall()
rowcount = len(tempvar)

Answer 4

This is how I did it with sqlite3. I wrote a function which should simply things if you have to query the database more than once.

import sqlite3

def inquire(sql):
    db = sqlite3.connect(my_database.sqlite)
    cursor = db.cursor()
    cursor.execute(sql)
    results = cursor.fetchall()
    return results
    db.close()

sql = "SELECT COUNT (*) FROM fixtures"
results = inquire(sql)

print(results)