DBCenter

A real PostgreSQL, embedded in your process. No server to install, no Docker, no connection string to configure - the binaries are fetched once and the database runs as a child process against a directory you choose.

from dbcenter import DBCenter

db = DBCenter(path="./data")
users = db.collection("users")
users.insert_one({"name": "Ada", "age": 36})
print(users.find({"age": {"$gt": 30}}))

Because it is PostgreSQL rather than an imitation of it, the extensions come too. PostGIS and pgvector are downloaded and installed on first use:

db.install_extension("postgis")
db.query("""
    SELECT ST_Distance(
        ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(29.0, 41.0), 4326)::geography,
        ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(32.85, 39.93), 4326)::geography
    ) / 1000 AS km
""")

store = db.vector_store("documents", dimension=1536)
store.add(ids=["a"], embeddings=[[0.1] * 1536])

Fuzzy text search is pg_trgm, which ships with PostgreSQL:

db.collection("cities").fuzzy_search("Istanbu", "name")

What you get

• A real PostgreSQL. Its planner, its transactions, its types. db.query() takes any SQL, with bound parameters.
• PostGIS and pgvector, installed on demand. The Linux PostGIS build carries its own GEOS and PROJ, so it works on a machine with nothing installed.
• A collection API over ordinary relational tables. Columns are added as documents introduce fields.
• Sync to storage, optionally, with multi_user_sync=True and a SyncEngine: a local directory or Google Drive from Python, and S3 or anything S3-compatible through the dbcenter-serve container. Tables are written as Parquet with a column per field, and columnar=True reads them back through DuckDB for aggregates.

Notes

The PostgreSQL distribution is downloaded to ~/.dbcenter on first use, about 60MB, and reused after that. Extension archives are verified against digests pinned in the source, so a substituted one is refused.

PostgreSQL refuses to run as root, so neither can this. In a container that runs as root - which most base images do - create a user first and start the database as them; the error says so if you forget.

Extensions are built per PostgreSQL major version. Asking for one with no published build is an error naming the versions that exist, rather than a download that fails later.

MIT licensed. Source at github.com/heyobi/dbcenter.