iceaxe-sqlite

iceaxe-sqlite is a SQLite-focused rewrite of the original iceaxe, which is built around Postgres. The model, query, and data-access conventions from Iceaxe are still extremely effective, so this project keeps those patterns while retargeting them to SQLite.

That split is intentional. Rather than chasing a backend-agnostic API like Peewee or SQLAlchemy, iceaxe-sqlite stays opinionated about the datastore underneath it. The goal is for the ORM surface area to match SQLite itself, so the abstractions stay simple, predictable, and honest about what the database can do.

If you already like the way Iceaxe models tables and fetches data, this package gives you those same conventions in a form designed specifically for SQLite.

Goals are also similar:

• 🏎️ Performance: We want to exceed or match the fastest ORMs in Python and stay close to raw SQLite query performance.
• 📝 Typehinting: Everything should be typehinted with expected types. Declare your data as you expect in Python and it should bidirectionally sync to the database.
• 🪶 SQLite first: Use a small async SQLite backend with no external database server.
• ⚡ Common things are easy, rare things are possible: 99% of the SQL queries we write are vanilla SELECT/INSERT/UPDATEs. These should be natively supported by your ORM. If you're writing really complex queries, these are better done by hand so you can see exactly what SQL will be run.

The original Iceaxe conventions are used in production at several companies. iceaxe-sqlite is an independent project. It's compatible with the Mountaineer ecosystem, but you can use it in whatever project and web framework you're using.

Installation

Install with uv:

uv add iceaxe-sqlite

Otherwise install with pip:

pip install iceaxe-sqlite

Usage

Define your models as a TableBase subclass:

from iceaxe_sqlite import TableBase

class Person(TableBase):
    id: int
    name: str
    age: int

TableBase is a subclass of Pydantic's BaseModel, so you get all of the validation and Field customization out of the box. We provide our own Field constructor that adds database-specific configuration. For instance, to make the id field a primary key / auto-incrementing you can do:

from iceaxe_sqlite import Field

class Person(TableBase):
    id: int = Field(primary_key=True)
    name: str
    age: int

Okay now you have a model. How do you interact with it?

Databases are based on a few core primitives to insert data, update it, and fetch it out again. To do so you'll need a database connection. The DBConnection is the core class for all ORM actions against the database.

from iceaxe_sqlite import DBConnection, connect

conn = DBConnection(await connect("app.db"))

The Person class currently just lives in memory. To back it with a full database table, we can run raw SQL or run a migration to add it:

await conn.conn.execute(
    """
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS person (
        id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
        name TEXT NOT NULL,
        age INT NOT NULL
    )
    """
)

Magic Migrations

For local development or side projects, you can use magic_migrate to automatically sync your database schema with your models:

await conn.magic_migrate("my_project")

# Or apply the live schema diff without writing migration files to disk
await conn.magic_migrate("my_project", no_files=True)

This will:

1. Compare your current database schema against your model definitions
2. Generate a migration file if changes are detected
3. Apply all pending migrations

By default, migration files are written to your package's migrations/ folder, giving you a history of schema changes. If you pass no_files=True, Iceaxe skips the file write and applies the schema diff directly to the current database.

Recommended workflow for production:

While magic_migrate is convenient for rapid local iteration, we recommend a more controlled approach before merging to production:

1. Iterate freely during development using magic_migrate
2. Before merging, reset your database to the production schema state
3. Run uv run migrate generate once to generate a single, clean migration file
4. Commit this migration file with your PR

This ensures your production migrations are clean and reviewable, while still giving you the speed of automatic migrations during development.

Inserting Data

Instantiate object classes as you normally do:

people = [
    Person(name="Alice", age=30),
    Person(name="Bob", age=40),
    Person(name="Charlie", age=50),
]
await conn.insert(people)

print(people[0].id) # 1
print(people[1].id) # 2

Because we're using an auto-incrementing primary key, the id field will be populated after the insert. Iceaxe will automatically update the object in place with the newly assigned value.

Updating data

Now that we have these lovely people, let's modify them.

person = people[0]
person.name = "Blice"

Right now, we have a Python object that's out of state with the database. But that's often okay. We can inspect it and further write logic - it's fully decoupled from the database.

def ensure_b_letter(person: Person):
    if person.name[0].lower() != "b":
        raise ValueError("Name must start with 'B'")

ensure_b_letter(person)

To sync the values back to the database, we can call update:

await conn.update([person])

If we were to query the database directly, we see that the name has been updated:

id | name  | age
----+-------+-----
  1 | Blice |  31
  2 | Bob   |  40
  3 | Charlie | 50

But no other fields have been touched. This lets a potentially concurrent process modify Alice's record - say, updating the age to 31. By the time we update the data, we'll change the name but nothing else. Under the hood we do this by tracking the fields that have been modified in-memory and creating a targeted UPDATE to modify only those values.

Selecting data

To select data, we can use a QueryBuilder. For a shortcut to select query functions, you can also just import select directly. This method takes the desired value parameters and returns a list of the desired objects.

from iceaxe_sqlite import select

query = select(Person).where(Person.name == "Blice", Person.age > 25)
results = await conn.exec(query)

If we inspect the typing of results, we see that it's a list[Person] objects. This matches the typehint of the select function. You can also target columns directly:

query = select((Person.id, Person.name)).where(Person.age > 25)
results = await conn.exec(query)

This will return a list of tuples, where each tuple is the id and name of the person: list[tuple[int, str]].

We support most of the common SQL operations. Just like the results, these are typehinted to their proper types as well. Static typecheckers and your IDE will throw an error if you try to compare a string column to an integer, for instance. A more complex example of a query:

query = select((
    Person.id,
    FavoriteColor,
)).join(
    FavoriteColor,
    Person.id == FavoriteColor.person_id,
).where(
    Person.age > 25,
    Person.name == "Blice",
).order_by(
    Person.age.desc(),
).limit(10)
results = await conn.exec(query)

As expected this will deliver results - and typehint - as a list[tuple[int, FavoriteColor]]

Production

The underlying SQLite connection wrapped by conn stays alive while the DBConnection is in memory. For web apps, create one connection per process or use your framework lifecycle hooks to open and close it deliberately. SQLite serializes writes, so high-write deployments should plan around short transactions and WAL mode when appropriate.

Benchmarking

We have basic benchmarking tests in the __tests__/benchmarks directory. To run them, you'll need to execute the pytest suite:

uv run pytest -m integration_tests

Development

If you update your Cython implementation during development, you'll need to re-compile the Cython code. This can be done with a simple uv sync.

uv sync