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2961

answers:

8

From some forum I came to know that Multiple database support is added in Django at lower level, but the higher level apis are not added yet.

Can anyone please tell me how one can achieve multiple database connections in Django.

Does anyone have any idea by when Django will fully/officially support Multiple database connections.

+4  A: 

The most recent discussion I've seen on it was in the Proposal: user-friendly API for multi-database support django-developers thread, which also has an example of one way to use multiple databases using Managers in the original message.

insin
A: 

I think you will have to resort to "raw sql" .. kinda thing ..
look here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/

you need a "connection" to your other database, if you look at django/db/__init__.py around line 39 (in my version ..)

connection = backend.DatabaseWrapper(**settings.DATABASE_OPTIONS)

try to take it from there ..
P.S. I haven't really tried this or anything .. just trying to point in the general direction of what I think might solve your problem.

hasen j
+1  A: 

If you read a few of the many (many) threads on this subject in django-dev, you will see that what looks straightforward, isn't. If you pick a single use case, then it looks easy, but as soon as you start to generalize in any way you start to run into trouble.

To use the above-referenced thread as an example, when you say "multiple databases", which of the following are you talking about?

  • All DB on the same machine under the same engine.
  • All DB on same machine, different engines (E.g. MySQL + PostgreSQL)
  • One Master DB with N read-only slaves on different machines.
  • Sharding of tables across multiple DB servers.

Will you need:

  • Foreign keys across DBs
  • JOINs across machines and/or engines
  • etc. etc.

One of the problems with a slick ORM like Django's is that it hides all of those messy details under a nice paint job. To continue to do that, but to then add in any of the above, is Not Easy (tm).

Peter Rowell
I do understand that it is really a complicated job.But then django may only be used for simple web applications, once the application grow large, it becomes mandatory to split data in multiple database server(sharding). How wud a developer handle such cases?
codebreak
Of all the multiple database issues, sharding may be the most application specific, and therefore the most difficult to yield to a general solution. Do you know of any ORM that has a general solution to this problem?
Peter Rowell
+1  A: 

Eric Florenzano wrote a very good blog post that allows you some multiple database support at: Easy MultipleDatabase Support for Django.

It starts by creating a new custom manager that allows you to specify the database settings.

Corey Oordt
Modifying the global settings object as per Eric's example isn't a threadsafe thing to do. It looks like maybe the lower-level connection API has changed to allow the settings to be passed in, which would make it threadsafe.
Joe Holloway
A: 

Eric Florenzano's approach works well if all your databases use the same engine. If you have different engines (Postgres and MSSQL in my case) you will run into many issues deep in the ORM code (such as models/sql/where.py using the default connection's SQL syntax).

If you need this to work, you should wait for Alex Gaynor's MultiDB project which is planned for Django 1.2

washeck
+2  A: 

If you simply need multiple connections, you can do something like this:

from django.db import load_backend
myBackend = load_backend('postgresql_psycopg2') # or 'mysql', 'sqlite3', 'oracle'
myConnection = myBackend.DatabaseWrapper({
    'DATABASE_HOST': '192.168.1.1',
    'DATABASE_NAME': 'my_database',
    'DATABASE_OPTIONS': {},
    'DATABASE_PASSWORD': "",
    'DATABASE_PORT': "",
    'DATABASE_USER': "my_user",
    'TIME_ZONE': "America/New_York",})
# Now we can do all the standard raw sql stuff with myConnection.
myCursor = myConnection.cursor()
myCursor.execute("SELECT COUNT(1) FROM my_table;")
myCursor.fetchone()
Dave Aaron Smith
+4  A: 

This will be in Django 1.2.

See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/

blueyed
A: 

From Django 1.2, it will support multiple databases. See: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/ Version 1.2 is now in beta

Jack Ha