AttributeError: module 'odbc' has no attribute 'connect' - python with pydev

Issue

I am very new to python and I just can't seem to find an answer to this error. When I run the code below I get the error

AttributeError: module 'odbc' has no attribute 'connect'

However, the error only shows in eclipse. There's no problem if I run it via command line. I am running python 3.5. What am I doing wrong?

try:
    import pyodbc
except ImportError:
    import odbc as pyodbc

# Specifying the ODBC driver, server name, database, etc. directly
cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=PXLstr,17;DATABASE=Dept_MR;UID=guest;PWD=password')

The suggestion to remove the try...except block did not work for me. Now the actual import is throwing the error as below:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\a\workspace\TestPyProject\src\helloworld.py", line 2, in <module>
    import pyodbc
  File "C:\Users\a\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3\Lib\site-packages\sqlalchemy\dialects\mssql\pyodbc.py", line 105, in <module>
    from .base import MSExecutionContext, MSDialect, VARBINARY

I do have pyodbc installed and the import and connect works fine with the command line on windows.

thank you

Solution

The problem here is that the pyodbc module is not importing in your try / except block. I would highly recommend not putting import statements in try blocks. First, you would want to make sure you have pyodbc installed (pip install pyodbc), preferably in a virtualenv, then you can do something like this:

import pyodbc

cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=PXLstr,17;DATABASE=Dept_MR;UID=guest;PWD=password')

cursor = cnxn.cursor()
cursor.execute('SELECT 1')

for row in cursor.fetchall():
    print(row)

If you're running on Windows (it appears so, given the DRIVER= parameter), take a look at virtualenvwrapper-win for managing Windows Python virtual environments: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenvwrapper-win

Good luck!

Answered By - FlipperPA