JSON adapter

The JSON adapter allows easy exchange of unstructured data with the database:

>>> cur.execute(
...     """select '{"a":[1,2,3],"b":[4,5,6]}'::json""")
>>> cur.fetchone()[0]
{u'a': [1, 2, 3], u'b': [4, 5, 6]}

It works with PostgreSQL 9.2 native JSON data type, with previous versions' extension modules and, in a pinch, with regular text too. You can feed JSON data to PostgreSQL using a specific adapter:

curs.execute("insert into mytable (jsondata) values (%s)",
    [Json({'a': 100})])

or you can be more aggressive and ask for automatic JSON serialization for every type you want to support, dictionaries for instance:

psycopg2.extensions.register_adapter(dict, Json)
curs.execute("insert into mytable (jsondata) values (%s)",
    [{'a': 100}])

Range adapters

Other handy adapters for PostgreSQL 9.2 are the Range data type adapters family: ranges are returned as an object allowing access to their properties:

>>> cur.execute("""select '[10,20)'::int4range""")
>>> r = cur.fetchone()[0]
>>> r.lower
10
>>> r.upper_inc
False

Of course the Python object can be used as arguments in query parameters:

r = DateRange(date(2013,1,1), date(2013,2,1), '[)')
cur.execute("select * from events where %s @> date", [r])

Built-in range types are supported out-of-the-box, while the function register_range() allows handling user-defined range types.

Connections and cursors as context managers

A recent DBAPI extension has standardized the use of connections and cursors as context managers: it is now possible to use an idiom such as:

with psycopg2.connect(DSN) as conn:
    with conn.cursor() as curs:
       curs.execute(SQL)

with the intuitive behaviour: when the cursor block exits the cursor is closed; when the connection block exits normally the current transaction is committed, if it exits with an exception instead the transaction is rolled back, in either case the connection is ready to be used again (FIXED: the connection is NOT closed as originally stated).

Other new features in Psycopg 2.5

• Added Diagnostics object to get extended info from a database error. Many thanks to Matthew Woodcraft for the implementation (ticket #149).
• Added connection.cursor_factory attribute to customize the default object returned by cursor().
• Added support for backward scrollable cursors. Thanks to Jon Nelson for the initial patch (ticket #108).
• Added a simple way to customize casting of composite types into Python objects other than namedtuples. Many thanks to Ronan Dunklau and Tobias Oberstein for the feature development.
• connection.reset() implemented using DISCARD ALL on server versions supporting it.

Bug fixes:

• Properly cleanup memory of broken connections (ticket #148).
• Fixed bad interaction of setup.py with other dependencies in Distribute projects on Python 3 (ticket #153).

Other changes:

• Added support for Python 3.3.
• Dropped support for Python 2.4. Please use Psycopg 2.4.x if you need it.
• errorcodes map updated to PostgreSQL 9.2.
• Dropped Zope adapter from source repository. ZPsycopgDA has now its own project at <https://github.com/psycopg/ZPsycopgDA>.