Sync and Async

One of the motivations for making Piccolo was the lack of ORMs and query builders which support asyncio.

Piccolo is designed to be async first. However, you can use Piccolo in synchronous apps as well, whether that be a WSGI web app, or a data science script.

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Async example

You can await a query to run it:

>>> await Band.select(Band.name)
[{'name': 'Pythonistas'}]

Alternatively, you can await a query’s run method:

# This makes it extra explicit that a database query is being made:
>>> await Band.select(Band.name).run()

# It also gives you more control over how the query is run.
# For example, if we wanted to bypass the connection pool for some reason:
>>> await Band.select(Band.name).run(in_pool=False)

Using the async version is useful for applications which require high throughput. Piccolo makes building an ASGI web app really simple - see ASGI.

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Sync example

This lets you execute a query in an application which isn’t using asyncio:

>>> Band.select(Band.name).run_sync()
[{'name': 'Pythonistas'}]

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Explicit

By using await and run_sync, it makes it very explicit when a query is actually being executed.

Until you execute await or run_sync, you can chain as many methods onto your query as you like, safe in the knowledge that no database queries are being made.