Posts Tagged ‘orm’

DB Transaction “BEGIN” in Django shell

Thursday, September 3rd, 2015

Django provides a handy “shell” which can be invoked using the manage.py for a project, and which will usefully setup the necessary Django environment and even invoke ipython for completion, syntax highlighting, debugger, etc.

Also usefully, but very much separate from the shell functionality, Django provides a nice framework for dealing with database transactions through its ORM. One can use django.db.transaction.rollback() for example.

However, the shell by default will be invoked with autocommit, meaning that each individual SQL statement gets committed. When one is poking around freehand in the shell, this might not be for the best, so one may want to turn off autocommit and resort to the choice of being able to rollback().

Unfortunately for that use case, all of the Django infrastructure for beginning database transactions is focused on how to begin a transaction in your code, where it rightly would be expected to be within a function or at least a “with” block. Hence, the docs and the code focus on using decorators, e.g. “@transaction.commit_on_success” or context managers, e.g. “with transaction.commit_on_success():“. Obviously not helpful in the shell / REPL.

If you are in your “manage.py shell” and need to do some romping around in your single-database Django app while being wrapped up in the warm fuzzy security blanket of a DB transaction lest you fat-finger something, you can get the same effect for your subsequent few commands in the shell with:

from django.db import transaction
transaction.enter_transaction_management()
transaction.managed(True)
# do stuff
imp = my_models.ImportantObject(title="Emabrassing Tpyos In the Titel")
imp.save()
# oops
transaction.rollback()
# this is too stressful, let's quit
transaction.leave_transaction_management()

Caveats: this only works in a one-database-connection setup where using the default connection does what you want; newer versions of Django may have a nice way to do this; don’t trust my random blog post with your production data!

Django auto_now types wreck get_or_create functionality

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

I recently had occasion to lazily use the Django “get_or_create” convenience method to instantiate some database ORM records. This worked fine the first time through, and I didn’t have to write the tedious “query, check, then insert” rigamarole. So far so good. These were new records so the “or_create” part was operative.

Then, while actually testing the “get_” part by running over the same input dataset, I noticed it was nearly as slow as the INSERTs, even though it should have been doing indexed SELECTs over a modest, in-memory table. Odd. I checked the debug output from Django and discovered that get_or_create was invoking UPDATE calls.

The only field it was updating was:

updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

Thanks, Django. You just created a tautological truth. It was updated at that datetime because … you updated it at that datetime.

Interestingly, its sister field did NOT get updated:

created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, editable=False)

This field, true to its args, was not editable, even by whatever evil gnome was going around editing the updated_at field.

Recommendation: if you want actual timestamps in your database, why don’t you use a real database and put a trigger on it? ORM-layer nonsense is a surefire way to have everything FUBAR as soon as someone drops to raw SQL for performance or clarity.