Question

I have a big DBF file (~700MB). I’d like to select only a few lines from it using a python script. I’ve seen that dbfpy is a nice module that allows to open this type of database, but for now I haven’t found any querying capability. Iterating through all the elements from python is simply too slow.

Can I do what I want from python in a reasonable time?

Answer 1

Using my dbf module you can create temporary indexes and then search using those:

import dbf

table = dbf.Table('big.dbf')
index = table.create_index(lambda rec: rec.field) # field should be actual field name

records = index.search(match=('value',))

Creating the index may take a few seconds, but the searches after that are extremely quick.