> 1) We can provide a feature to select the type of cursor that is not > much dissimilar from psycopg2 > 2) Do we need DictCursor/RealDictCursor? ISTM that one of the two > would be sufficient? Possibly an object inheriting from a Python dict > instead of emulating it so that e.g. json.dumps()
Inheriting from dict is strange because we only need read access. So rather collections.abc.Mapping, I think.
One advantage of using a real dict is that it leaves the door open for the caller to mutate the results as they consume them. A little impure, I know, but one practical example I can think of would be where you want to augment your results with additional data (coming from a different source, outside the database).
RealDictCursor gives you the flexibility to do this, whereas collections.abc.Mapping would force you to construct a new dict instance for every row in order to get the same result.