Document close() and add missing public members to API docs

- Expanded close() docstring
- Added "Closing connections" section to quickstart
- Added has_table, views, exists to API docs
- Removed stale "no way to close connections" note

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: pudo

dataset/database.py

@@ -212,7 +212,12 @@ def __exit__(
             self.rollback()
 
     def close(self) -> None:
-        """Close database connections. Makes this object unusable."""
+        """Close all database connections and dispose of the engine.
+
+        Releases all pooled connections and makes this object unusable.
+        This should be called when the database is no longer needed,
+        especially in multi-threaded or connection-pooled setups.
+        """
         with self.lock:
             for conn in self.connections.values():
                 conn.close()

docs/api.rst

@@ -7,26 +7,19 @@ Connecting
 
 .. autofunction:: dataset.connect
 
-Notes
------
-
-* **dataset** uses SQLAlchemy connection pooling when connecting to the
-  database. There is no way of explicitly clearing or shutting down the
-  connections, other than having the dataset instance garbage collected.
-
 Database
 --------
 
 .. autoclass:: dataset.Database
-   :members: tables, get_table, create_table, load_table, query, begin, commit, rollback
+   :members: tables, views, has_table, get_table, create_table, load_table, query, begin, commit, rollback, close
    :special-members:
 
 
 Table
 -----
 
 .. autoclass:: dataset.Table
-   :members: columns, find, find_one, all, count, distinct, insert, insert_ignore, insert_many, update, update_many, upsert, upsert_many, delete, create_column, create_column_by_example, drop_column, create_index, drop, has_column, has_index
+   :members: exists, columns, find, find_one, all, count, distinct, insert, insert_ignore, insert_many, update, update_many, upsert, upsert_many, delete, create_column, create_column_by_example, drop_column, create_index, drop, has_column, has_index
    :special-members: __len__, __iter__
 
 

docs/quickstart.rst

@@ -95,6 +95,19 @@ Nested transactions are supported too::
         with db as tx2:
             tx2['user'].insert(dict(name='Jane Doe', age=37, country='France', gender='female'))
 
+Closing connections
+-------------------
+
+When you're done with a database, call :py:meth:`close() <dataset.Database.close>`
+to release all connections back to the pool and dispose of the engine::
+
+    db = dataset.connect('sqlite:///mydb.db')
+    # ... do work ...
+    db.close()
+
+This is especially important in multi-threaded applications or when using
+connection-pooled databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), where open connections
+can accumulate and exhaust the pool.
 
 
 Inspecting databases and tables