SQLAlchemy’s philosophy is that relational databases behave less like object collections as the scale gets larger and performance starts being a concern, while object collections behave less like tables and rows as more abstraction is designed into them. For this reason it has adopted the data mapper pattern (similar to Hibernate for Java) rather than the active record pattern used by a number of other object-relational mappers.[6] However, optional plugins allow users to develop using declarative syntax.[7]
History
SQLAlchemy was first released in February 2006[8][3] and has quickly become one of the most widely used object-relational mapping tools in the Python community, alongside Django‘s ORM.
The following example represents an n-to-1 relationship between movies and their directors. It is shown how user-defined Python classes create corresponding database tables, how instances with relationships are created from either side of the relationship, and finally how the data can be queried—illustrating automatically generated SQL queries for both lazy and eager loading.
Schema definition
Creating two Python classes and according database tables in the DBMS:
fromsqlalchemyimport *
fromsqlalchemy.ext.declarativeimport declarative_base
fromsqlalchemy.ormimport relation, sessionmaker
Base = declarative_base()
classMovie(Base):
__tablename__ = "movies"
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
title = Column(String(255), nullable=False)
year = Column(Integer)
directed_by = Column(Integer, ForeignKey("directors.id"))
director = relation("Director", backref="movies", lazy=False)
def __init__(self, title=None, year=None):
self.title = title
self.year = year
def __repr__(self):
return "Movie(%r, %r, %r)" % (self.title, self.year, self.director)
classDirector(Base):
__tablename__ = "directors"
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
name = Column(String(50), nullable=False, unique=True)
def __init__(self, name=None):
self.name = name
def __repr__(self):
return "Director(%r)" % (self.name)
engine = create_engine("dbms://user:pwd@host/dbname")
Base.metadata.create_all(engine)
Data insertion
One can insert a director-movie relationship via either entity:
alldata = session.query(Movie).all()
for somedata in alldata:
print(somedata)
SQLAlchemy issues the following query to the DBMS (omitting aliases):
SELECT movies.id, movies.title, movies.year, movies.directed_by, directors.id, directors.name
FROM movies LEFTOUTERJOIN directors ON directors.id = movies.directed_by
Setting lazy=True (default) instead, SQLAlchemy would first issue a query to get the list of movies and only when needed (lazy) for each director a query to get the name of the according director:
SELECT movies.id, movies.title, movies.year, movies.directed_by
FROM movies
SELECT directors.id, directors.name
FROM directors
WHERE directors.id = %s
SQL is a database programming language and was developed by Edgar Codd in 1974 and is still important in the programming language world.
Relational Database
Edgar F. Codd (1923–2003)
Storing large amounts of data was one of the early uses for computers, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how the data should be organized. At IBM’s San Jose research laboratory, computer scientist Edgar Codd devised an approach for organizing and arranging data that was more efficient than other models. Instead of grouping together data belonging to the same entity, his approach created large tables of data that had the same conceptual types, with identifying numbers (IDs) defining the relationships between records in different the tables.
For example, an insurance company might have one table of customers, with each customer having a CUSTOMER ID and a name. Then there might be another table of insurance policies, with each having a POLICY ID, a CUSTOMER ID, and a POLICY TYPE ID. A third table might link the POLICY TYPE ID and the details of the policy. In this example, to find the insurance policies for a customer, the computer would first find the CUSTOMER ID, and then find all of the policies that had the same CUSTOMER ID. To get the details of each policy, the system would take the POLICY ID, look it up in the table of policies to get the POLICY TYPE ID, and then search the table of policy types to find the details.
Codd’s groundbreaking research showed that organizing data in this fashion made it more efficient to store, faster to access, and easier to program. Most importantly, he showed that it was possible to create a general-purpose database engine for storing data on the computer’s hard drive, freeing programmers from the task and allowing them to concentrate on their applications. Once the database was developed and deployed, improvements to the underlying software benefitted all of the applications that relied on it. For his work, Codd was awarded the 1981 A.M. Turing Award.
Today the operating systems of both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android create a relational database on every smartphone for every app that’s installed, making Codd’s invention one of the dominant ways of storing data.