Generic database dictionary access

[Edward Diener]

Version 2.0 of the Python database API was written over 5 years ago, in
1999. While it has been used successfully by many implementations, there is
no generic access into the data dictionary of relational databases except at
the table column level. I am working on some Python which would hopefully
give me a form of generic access to more common data dictionary
functionality such as indices, constraints etc. but no such functionality
currently exists in the official Python distribution. Has there been any
movement in the 5 year time span since the 2.0 API was published to add
richer generic functionality for relational databases as regards data
dictionary access ? I fully realize that each major RDBMS has its own
methods for programatically querying its data dictionary, and I suspect that
there is no common SQL specification for doing so, but I would think that
richer functionality along these lines might be welcome to Python database
programmers other than myself.