techspot.zzzeek.org

It's super-hard to find good large blocks of time to work on SQLAlchemy at the moment...but I did manage to get most of the major "whats new?" bits up on the wiki. I'm really close to pulling the trigger on a beta release, and we already have people running trunk. There's just a certain presence of mind I like to have before releasing that hasn't been clicking on weekends.

Read about the big new items and what to expect when upgrading, at http://www.sqlalchemy.org/trac/wiki/06Migration.

I don't usually blog about releases, especially point releases, but this one is pretty significant in that we've repaired some very severe speed bumps that were impacting the flush() process. Anyone working with large numbers of objects that has observed the Session to slow down as it gets bigger should download this release, as that issue has been resolved. Other latencies within flush() have also been flattened, and a few spreadsheet jobs that I run here which were taking 20-30 minutes now complete in about five.

It's still not nearly as fast as running a single huge executemany() to insert lots of rows, but if your experience with this release is like mine you should see much faster runs for large data update operations. As usual there's dozens of other fixes and enhancements too.

SQLAlchemy 0.5.4p1's download page is at:

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/download.html

or, just use easy_install.

Work on the 0.6 series continues, as this release is focused on expanding the world of compatibility for SQLAlchemy, including compatibility with Python 3K, Jython, and many more DBAPI implementations. It also refactors DDL generation to work within the same compiler framework as that of non-DDL expressions, so you can easily create and execute CreateTable kinds of objects. Database reflection has been greatly enhanced with a new Inspector API too.

Let's meditate on this for a moment.

Oracle will own MySQL.

time to take the postgres plunge ? (all those who haven't as of yet).

Wayne Witzel gives us a very nice tutorial on how to implement simple tagging with SQLAlchemy. It's a totally straightforward example with nice usage of 0.5 Query paradigms as well as some SQL expression language integration (which looks familiar from the ML the other day...).

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 hadn't heard before (its extremely annoying when someone rolls up the entire multi-decades of work with SQL into a mere "its all just an Oracle marketing ploy"), not to mention db40s headline article which references the uber-anti-SQL screed of all time, the Vietnam of Computer Science (nothing inflammatory there...). Gavin also makes some refs to Perl 6 and VB which are hysterical (in the funny way, not the crazy way).