Discontinuing the pymssql Project

[Randy Syring]

I believe it's become necessary to discontinue the pymssql project.  Pymssql is a dbapi2 drive for Microsoft SQL server.

Full Announcement: https://github.com/pymssql/pymssql/issues/668

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to pymssql over the years. Unfortunately, I believe it's time to discontinue pymssql. It provides an incredible amount of utility to those of us that need to connect to MSSQL from Python. But, as a project, it has failed to attract enough interest/talent/funding to maintain it.

Why discontinue it and not let someone else maintain it? We've tried over the years. See #516. We have got a few people drop by to help occasionally, but nothing sustained enough to feel like transfer of the project was warranted.

I had always hoped my consulting business would be able to help maintain the library for clients that use it. But there is too much work here for us to tackle that doesn't really benefit our client's usage and we transitioned to PyODBC earlier this year.

I'm also concerned that if I simply abandon the project a bad actor could gain control and start installing nasty stuff on what I am sure is a lot of corporate servers.

It's my hope that by discontinuing this project better solutions will be developed and/or adopted to take it's place.

Other Related Issues

• Proposal to discontinue pymssql in favor of pyodbc #477
• Maintainers Needed - Apply Within #516
• Finding grants/funding for pymssql development #621

Alternatives

• pyodbc: Microsoft backed
  • But see: https://github.com/level12/sqlalchemy_pyodbc_mssql
• ctds: by Zillow

Interested in Taking Over?

Just fork pymssql and start your own project. Gain momentum, show progress, and I'd be happy to link to your project from here.

Next Steps

I'm going to leave this issue open for suggestions on how best to deprecate/discontinue pymssql as a project. I'm sure there will be some who will suddenly be very interested in helping. I won't be considering those requests at this point. If you want to help, see above about forking.

At the end of November, 2019 I'm going to Archive this GH repository which will make it read-only.

I'll also need to figure out how to deprecate packages on PyPI so that people installing know the project is being discontinued.

Randy Syring
Husband | Father | Redeemed Sinner

"For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world
and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36 ESV)