Migration in Python Web Frameworks ORMs

Today, I felt like doing a quick tour of the migration features provided by the ORMs used by the Python web frameworks. I started with Django. South looks better than Django-evolution which looks much better than dmigrations which is very low level. I also had a look at SQLAlchemy.migrate, but again, that's too low level for me since I am looking to define migrations with the same vocabulary that is used for the data model, independently of the underlying database schema.

The features listed in the South documentation have all been in CubicWeb for some time, except dependencies and autodetection. In my opinion, the dependency feature is not needed when you already have a list of scripts ordered by number, which is the case in South and in CubicWeb. The autodetection feature is more interesting, but it is tricky to get right. CubicWeb migration mechanism has had some kind of autodetection for a long time, but it is limited to the part that is easy to get right, yet quite common and useful:

• synchronizing properties of attributes and relationships (i.e. a Person.name becomes fulltextindexed or a has_portfolio relationship changes from 1-1 to 1-n)
• synchronizing permissions

For other common tasks like adding or removing entities and attributes, high-level directives are provided like add_entity_type or remove_attribute.

Up to now, not pushing autodetection of changes in the data model has been a deliberate choice, for diff'ing two models is complex and creating a migration path is even more difficult. Moreover, letting the ORM automatically overwrite local changes in the database schema can be harmful in some cases.

In CubicWeb, the idea is that the developer knows better than the framework, so let him decide what's best and provide him with a concise vocabulary to write the migration scripts.

photo by Tim in Sydney under creative commons.