How to fix TypeError: 'autocommit' unexpected keyword argument in Python sqlite3

Posted on 13 Jun 2026

So there I was, writing a quick script to churn through an array of items and throw them into a local SQLite database. Standard stuff. Because I didn’t want the script to crawl at a snail’s pace by writing to the disk on every single loop iteration, I decided to do the sensible thing: turn off autocommit mode and just batch-commit the whole thing at the end.

I confidently typed out the connection string, hit run, and the Python interpreter immediately slapped me in the face with this beautiful piece of performance art:

TypeError: sqlite3.connect() got an unexpected keyword argument ‘autocommit’

Excuse me?

Modern versions of python (3.12 and above) let you pass the autocommit argument directly like this:

con = sqlite3.connect('findpkg.db', autocommit=False)

But legacy python versions like the 3.8 one I’m running don’t have this feature yet. Instead, it uses the isolation_level argument to control the transaction behavior. The documented values are as follows:

None        # autocommit mode on (Python None, not a string)
'DEFERRED'  # default
'IMMEDIATE'
'EXCLUSIVE'

Examples:

con = sqlite3.connect('findpkg.db', isolation_level='DEFERRED') # default, autocommit = False
con = sqlite3.connect('findpkg.db', isolation_level=None) # autocommit = True

Remembering this simple python quirk can save you a lot of headache while maintaining legacy production code that needs batch inserts like this:

con = sqlite3.connect('findpkg.db', isolation_level='DEFERRED')
cur = con.cursor()

items = [
    {"full_name": "pkg1", "description": "First package", "stars": 10, "language": "Python"},
    {"full_name": "pkg2", "description": "Second package", "stars": 42, "language": "Go"}
]

for i, item in enumerate(items):
	sql = "insert into repositories (full_name, description, stars, language) values (?,?,?,?)"
	cur.execute(sql, [item['full_name'], item['description'], item['stars'], item['language'] ])
	# autocommit here makes things slow.
	
con.commit() # manual commit

Running into autocommit issues on older Python versions? Hope this saved you some debugging time. Let me know in the comments if you hit other sqlite3 gotchas.

tagged under: python sqlite database