Examples -------- Read data from SQL via either a SQL query or a SQL tablename. When using a SQLite database only SQL queries are accepted, providing only the SQL tablename will result in an error. >>> from sqlite3 import connect >>> conn = connect(':memory:') >>> df = pd.DataFrame(data=[[0, '10/11/12'], [1, '12/11/10']], ... columns=['int_column', 'date_column']) >>> df.to_sql(name='test_data', con=conn) 2 >>> pd.read_sql('SELECT int_column, date_column FROM test_data', conn) int_column date_column 0 0 10/11/12 1 1 12/11/10 >>> pd.read_sql('test_data', 'postgres:///db_name') # doctest:+SKIP Apply date parsing to columns through the ``parse_dates`` argument The ``parse_dates`` argument calls ``pd.to_datetime`` on the provided columns. Custom argument values for applying ``pd.to_datetime`` on a column are specified via a dictionary format: >>> pd.read_sql('SELECT int_column, date_column FROM test_data', ... conn, ... parse_dates={"date_column": {"format": "%d/%m/%y"}}) int_column date_column 0 0 2012-11-10 1 1 2010-11-12 rX