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In a sentence, I'd say apsw is "the SQLite lover's SQLite library". The python stdlib one tries to provide a generic interface ("DBAPI") which is great if you want to be able to swap to a different database engine later, but it's bad for actually getting the most out of SQLite.

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It's not even that good for switching to different engines.

My normal mode of operation is via postgres(I like the functions better than sqlite) But for a recent little program thought it would be nice to have it a little more self contained and allow for a sqlite db if wanted. Ignoring the the sql differences(Remember, I use postgres for it's functions, so there were many) sqlite uses a different parameter style(I ended up writing an automatic converter to transform my psycopg3 style "%(name)s" to sqlite3's ":name") and I had got in the (perhaps bad) habit of keeping an open connection and using a context manager on the cursor where sqlite does not like that and really wants the context manager on the connection. The final hoop to jump through was getting the row output as a dict. Not super relevant as it is not default on psycopg either, but it takes a bit more effort on sqlite3.

So yes it is possible to make the database swapable, But even with the dbapi, it is not trivial.

Why do you say it's bad?

Everything to do with transactions, including nested transactions.

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