Create Your SqlAlchemy Connection URL
From Your pyodbc Connection String
OR Your Known Connection Parameters
I found all the other answers to be educational, and I found the SqlAlchemy Docs on connection strings helpful too, but I kept failing to connect to MS SQL Server Express 19 where I was using no username or password and trusted_connection='yes' (just doing development at this point).
Then I found THIS method in the SqlAlchemy Docs on Connection URLs built from a pyodbc connection string (or just a connection string), which is also built from known connection parameters (i.e. this can simply be thought of as a connection string that is not necessarily used in pyodbc). Since I knew my pyodbc connection string was working, this seemed like it would work for me, and it did!
This method takes the guesswork out of creating the correct format for what you feed to the SqlAlchemy create_engine method. If you know your connection parameters, you put those into a simple string per the documentation exemplified by the code below, and the create method in the URL class of the sqlalchemy.engine module does the correct formatting for you.
The example code below runs as is and assumes a database named master and an existing table named table_one with the schema shown below. Also, I am using pandas to import my table data. Otherwise, we'd want to use a context manager to manage connecting to the database and then closing the connection like HERE in the SqlAlchemy docs.
import pandas as pd
import sqlalchemy
from sqlalchemy.engine import URL
# table_one dictionary:
table_one = {'name': 'table_one',
'columns': ['ident int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY',
'value_1 int NOT NULL',
'value_2 int NOT NULL']}
# pyodbc stuff for MS SQL Server Express
driver='{SQL Server}'
server='localhost\SQLEXPRESS'
database='master'
trusted_connection='yes'
# pyodbc connection string
connection_string = f'DRIVER={driver};SERVER={server};'
connection_string += f'DATABASE={database};'
connection_string += f'TRUSTED_CONNECTION={trusted_connection}'
# create sqlalchemy engine connection URL
connection_url = URL.create(
"mssql+pyodbc", query={"odbc_connect": connection_string})
""" more code not shown that uses pyodbc without sqlalchemy """
engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine(connection_url)
d = {'value_1': [1, 2], 'value_2': [3, 4]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data=d)
df.to_sql('table_one', engine, if_exists="append", index=False)
Update
Let's say you've installed SQL Server Express on your linux machine. You can use the following commands to make sure you're using the correct strings for the following:
- For the driver:
odbcinst -q -d
- For the server:
sqlcmd -S localhost -U <username> -P <password> -Q 'select @@SERVERNAME'
