tinydb

TinyDB

TinyDB is a database package for Python, written entirely in Python, with a focus on providing a simple database solution for simple programs without the need for an extra external database server like Mongo.

You should use TinyDB if you only need to track a small amount of data across separate runs of a program. If you need advanced features like concurrent access or handling data for an HTTP server, you should use a more robust database package like Mongo or SQLite.

Examples

Record Runtimes

import time
from tinydb import TinyDB

db = TinyDB('runtimes.json')
db.insert({"runtime": time.time()})
for entry in iter(db):
    print(entry)

Each time you run this program, another entry with the key runtime will be inserted with the current time.time(), and all the previous times the program was ran will also be printed.

First run:

{'runtime': 1678895895.8667424}

Second run:

{'runtime': 1678895895.8667424}
{'runtime': 1678895897.6668615}

Note

When you try to open a database that doesn't exist, it will automatically be created and put into your file list. Since we used 'runtimes.json' in our code above, you can see it added in your project's file list to the left:

Search Database Entries

We can search through our database and only pull certain values that meet some specific critera with a Query:

from tinydb import TinyDB, Query

db = TinyDB('marbles.json')
# db.truncate() deletes the entire contents of database.
# This is just an example. Don't do this if you want to keep your data!
db.truncate()

db.insert({'color': 'red', 'count': 1})
db.insert({'color': 'green', 'count': 2})
db.insert({'color': 'blue', 'count': 3})
db.insert({'color': 'orange', 'count': 4})
db.insert({'color': 'purple', 'count': 5})

marbles = Query()
for entry in db.search(marbles.count >= 3):
    print(entry)

Output:

{'color': 'blue', 'count': 3}
{'color': 'orange', 'count': 4}
{'color': 'purple', 'count': 5}

Update Entry in Database

We can also use Query to select a certain document or documents to update. The following code creates an animals.json, inserts two items, and then adds 10 to animals with the type "dog":

from tinydb import TinyDB, Query
from tinydb.operations import add

db = TinyDB('animals.json')
# db.truncate() deletes the entire contents of database.
# This is just an example. Don't do this if you want to keep your data!
db.truncate()
db.insert({'type': 'cat', 'count': 5})
db.insert({'type': 'dog', 'count': 5})

animals = Query()
db.update(add('count', 10), animals.type == 'dog')
for entry in iter(db):
    print(entry)

Output:

{'type': 'cat', 'count': 5}
{'type': 'dog', 'count': 15}

Reference

TinyDB at tinydb.readthedocs.io