type change of dbshelve key between Python 2 and 3

[snippsat]

Does that seem reasonable? Just use encode() and decode() to go between UTF-8 strings and byte values when dealing with the key values?

Yes that's fine,Python 3 all that comes will be bytes if no encoding is specified.

>>> s = b'0x2044301'
>>> type(s)
<class 'bytes'>
>>> s = s.decode() # Same as s.decode('utf-8')
>>> s
'0x2044301'
>>> type(s)
<class 'str'> 

Any advice, or any known resources that have good advice on choosing a small db engine?
TinyDB, dataset
My test of dataset.