FDB is written as pure-Python module on top of Firebird client library (fbclient.so/dll) using ctypes, so make sure you have Firebird client properly installed before you try to install FDB, otherwise the installation will fail. FDB supports Firebird version 2.0 and higher.
FDB is distributed as setuptools package, so you’ll need setuptools or compatible package installed to install FDB properly.
Download the source tarball, uncompress it, then run the install command:
$ curl -O http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/f/fdb/fdb-1.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf fdb-1.2.tar.gz
$ cd fdb-1.2
$ python setup.py install
This brief tutorial aims to get the reader started by demonstrating elementary usage of FDB. It is not a comprehensive Python Database API tutorial, nor is it comprehensive in its coverage of anything else.
The numerous advanced features of FDB are covered in another section of this documentation, which is not in a tutorial format, though it is replete with examples.
Example 1
A database connection is typically established with code such as this:
import fdb
# The server is named 'bison'; the database file is at '/temp/test.db'.
con = fdb.connect(dsn='bison:/temp/test.db', user='sysdba', password='pass')
# Or, equivalently:
con = fdb.connect(
host='bison', database='/temp/test.db',
user='sysdba', password='pass'
)
Example 2
Suppose we want to connect to the database in SQL Dialect 1 and specifying UTF-8 as the character set of the connection:
import fdb
con = fdb.connect(
dsn='bison:/temp/test.db',
user='sysdba', password='pass',
dialect=1, # necessary for all dialect 1 databases
charset='UTF8' # specify a character set for the connection
)
For this section, suppose we have a table defined and populated by the following SQL code:
create table languages
(
name varchar(20),
year_released integer
);
insert into languages (name, year_released) values ('C', 1972);