If your DATE comes through pyodbc as a unicode, it's probably the driver

File this under "should have been obvious." I had a test script break today because I was trying to do date math on an object that wound up being a unicode instead of a date. I had gotten the variable value from a pyodbc query against a SQL 2008 database table with a DATE column. I knew that DATETIME columns came in as datetime.datetime objects, but the DATE column came in as a unicode, which seemed strange.

Turns out it's the ODBC driver. Demo:

In [78]: cnxn = pyodbc.connect("DSN=local;")

In [79]: crsr = cnxn.execute("select cast('2012-01-01' as date) as bar")

In [80]: r = crsr.fetchone()

In [81]: type(r.bar)
Out[81]: unicode

Then, when switching to SQLNCLI10:

In [96]: cnxn = pyodbc.connect("Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=localhost;Trusted_Connection=Yes;")

In [97]: crsr = cnxn.execute("select cast('2012-01-01' as date) as bar")

In [98]: r = crsr.fetchone()

In [99]: type(r.bar)
Out[99]: datetime.date