Extracting DB schema (newbie Q)

[james hedley]

On Monday, 14 May 2012 17:01:49 UTC+1, Steve Sawyer  wrote:
> Brand-new to Python (that's a warning, folks)
> 
> Trying to write a routine to import a CSV file into a SQL Server
> table. To ensure that I convert the data from the CSV appropriately,
> I"m executing a query that gives me the schema (data column names,
> data types and sizes) from the target table.
> 
> What I think I want to do is to construct a dictionary using the
> column names as the index value, and a list containing the various
> attributes (data type, lenghth, precision).
> 
> If this is NOT a good approach (or if there is a better approach),
> please issue a dope-slap, ignore the rest of this post and set me
> straight.
> 
> If this is a good approach, I ran into a problem populating the
> dictionary as I couldn't seem to figure out how to make the update()
> method work by passing the name property of the row object; I kept
> getting a "keyword can't be an expression" error.
> 
> What I was able to make work was to construct the command as a string
> and run exec(
> ), but seems there shoudl be a more
> direct way of updating the dictionary.
> 
> TIA.

Could you provide some demo code? Something minimal but runnable, which results in the error you're getting would be best.