[DB-SIG] how greedy should cursor.fetchmany be?

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Jun 11 10:55:44 CEST 2014


On 11.06.2014 03:06, Daniel Lenski wrote:
> I'm writing a DBAPI module for a custom database wrapper. The way I get
> data from a query is to ask the underlying database it for a chunk of rows,
> at which point it spits out an unpredictable number (it's a black box to
> me).
> 
> I'm trying to figure out how to implement cursor.fetchmany on top of this,
> and make it as efficient as possible. There are two limiting cases:
> 
>    1. Python caller asks for the next 10 rows, but the DB gives the next
>    100 rows. Obviously, I just cache the extra rows in this case.
>    2. Python caller asks for the next 100 rows, but the next call to the DB
>    only gives me 10 rows.
> 
> In case (2), PEP-249 seems to be telling me that I should keep calling the
> DB to get more rows:
> 
> The number of rows to fetch per call is specified by the parameter. If it
> is not given, the cursor's arraysize determines the number of rows to be
> fetched. *The method should try to fetch as many rows as indicated by the
> size parameter*. If this is not possible due to the specified number of
> rows not being available, fewer rows may be returned.
> 
> However, I'd rather implement it slightly differently: "... fetch as many
> rows as possible without incurring multiple calls to the underlying DB
> engine, but no more than indicated by the size parameter."
> 
> Having a loop to make multiple DB calls hidden in the DBAPI module, rather
> than in the client code, strikes me as a bad approach because it adds extra
> unpredictable latency. A properly-written client will have to do some
> looping anyway:
> 
> # client code to get next 10k rows from the cursor
> 
> rows = []
> while True:
>     # PEP-249 says that fetchmany should do its best to get as many rows as
> requested
> 
>     # ... but that will mean a similar or identical loop in the DBAPI module
> 
>     more_rows = cur.fetchmany(len(rows) - 10000)
>     if not more_rows:
>         break
>     else:
>         rows += more_rows
> 
> 
> What do you think? Is there some good reason to adhere strictly to PEP-249?

Applications will usually regard the case of returning fewer rows
than specified as having hit the end of the result set and then
not call .fetchmany() again to check for more rows, so I'm not
sure whether your less strict interpretation will be helpful in
making the database module compatible with existing applications.

Note that these applications use this interpretation for the
same reason that you specify: to avoid additional network
roundtrips just to check for an empty list return value
to mark the definite end of the result set.

It would probably be better for compatibility reasons to
have your module to introduce a special new method (say
.fetchchunk()) that works as you describe and have
.fetchmany() provide the regular DB-API behavior.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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