SQLAlchemy

Armin Ronacher, who has to be my biggest fan, is a great developer in his own right (and only 18 years old ? wow….). Here he is dropping a few ideas on Mako, Genshi and Jinja - while Jinjia is his own Django-like engine, he remains enthusiastic about the other two and uses [...]

We’re revisiting Robert Brewer’s Storm, SQLAlchemy and Geniusql. In that post, Robert set up a series of test suites intended to exercise the execution of basic INSERT, UPDATE and SELECT statements, using the established paradigms of each toolkit. ... [More] For SQLAlchemy, he used SQLAlchemy’s SQL expression language and not its ORM, Geniusql’s expression language, [...] [Less]

After much development effort and plenty of beta testing, version 0.4 of SQLAlchemy is released. For those who haven’t been following along, this release represents several months of refactorings, rewrites, API reorganizations, and re-documenting of ... [More] virtually every area of SQLAlchemy’s functionality. A handful of core developers and dozens of contributors have helped this [...] [Less]

Not satisfied with my last post, Robert Brewer decided to kick me around some more this weekend, posting all kinds of colorful graphs comparing SQLAlchemy’s expression compilation and execution speeds to Geniusql and Storm. Not surprisingly, SA was significantly slower than Geniusql and Storm in most tests except one, despite 0.4 being all [...]

A few weeks ago, Flávio Codeço Coelho posted a comparison of Python database interfaces, with a test that focused primarily on mass insert speed. While he had good things to say about our performance, I didn’t find the results to be very impressive, and not surprisingly - mass insert speed is something we’ve never [...]

The other day Ben Bangert pointed me over to Understanding Polymorphic Associations, a method used by ActiveRecord to allow a certain type of object to be associated with multiple kinds of parent object, along with the question “Can SQLAlchemy do this?”. My initial mental reaction when I hear “can SQLAlchemy do XYZ” is “probably”, with [...]

Rails ActiveRecord blatantly ignores a huge percentage of RDBMS capabilities. Therefore, since AR doesn’t care about SQL, neither should you ! SQL is just another annoyance like manual garbage collection, eventually we wont need it. Did I misinterpret something ? No really, SQL is so difficult, lets just do away with it. Just store [...]

Hibernate creator Gavin King weighs in on the recurring hype about pure (usually Java) object databases. I’m fairly certain at least one of his targets is these guys, which I’m merely guessing based on the ramblings of one of its supporters combined with Gavin’s references to the same “Oracle conspiracy” which was one I [...]

A cool post describing how to model a chessboard and all possible moves using a relational database. The setup reminds me a little of Norvig’s Suduko Solver , that of creating a structure representing first the basic board, then all possible combinations of legal square values (in this case, all legal moves of each [...]

SQLAlchemy has a system of changing its behavior known as MapperExtension. Its a raw and strictly functional base class which operates in the most boring way possible; you subclass it, overriding the methods where you’d like to inject custom behavior. Even klunkier, you have to explictly pass your new MapperExtension instance to all the [...]