SQLAlchemy

Continuing on with my sort of 'series' on various libraries and languages, I've recently started to use SQLAlchemy as an ORM layer in my current project.

The reason for using an ORM library came from the immortal problem of suddenly realising that I had a complicated object model defined and an equally complicated database schema and needing to get information between the two of them. I had started to hack together a script that would dump the data in using SQL, but I realised after the first few inserts that it would be a long hard slog that would be inflexible and complicated spaggeti code.

I didn't want to have to rewrite my object model significantly though, which meant I had to find an ORM library that would allow me to set up the mapping myself. I also needed it to work in Python, which then led me to SQLAlchemy. This nifty library comes in several libraries and is very flexible in the right ways to make it suitable for my needs (at least so far).

I'm still in the process of setting up the internal data structures. I'm needing to redo some parts of my internal object system but not significantly so, although I'm worried about it becoming a bit of a mess.

I'll comment on a bit more of the technical side of things in a few days when I've gotten more up to speed with the library.