The Mouse Vs. The Python

A couple years ago I wrote a rather flawed tutorial about SQLAlchemy. I decided it was about time for me to re-do that tutorial from scratch and hopefully do a better job of it this time around. Since I’m a music nut, we’ll be creating a simple database to store album information. A database isn’t a database without some relationships, so we’ll create two tables and connect them. Here are a few other things we’ll be learning:

• Adding data to each table
• Modifying data
• Deleting data
• Basic queries

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This blog ran an article about wxPython, SQLAlchemy, CRUD and MVC earlier this month. The program that we created in that post was dubbed “MediaLocker”, whether or not it was explicitly stated as such. Anyway, since then, I have received a couple comments about improving the program. One came from Michael Bayer, one of the creative minds behind SQLAlchemy itself and the other comments came from Werner Bruhin, a nice guy who haunts the wxPython mailing list, helping new users. So I went about creating an improved version of the code following their advice. Werner then improved it a bit more. So in this article, we will be looking at improving the code, first with my example and then with his. Enough talk though; let’s get to the meat of story! (more…)

I have been working on a software inventory script lately using SqlAlchemy on Windows XP to connect to a newly created table in a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. I created the table using Aqua Data Studio, logging in as the SQL Administrator (sa) and thought all was well until I tried to commit some data to the table. Here’s the screwy error that I received:

pyodbc.ProgrammingError: ('42000', '[42000] [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot find the object "dbo.software" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. (1088) (SQLExecDirectW)')

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A lot of websites are doing year-end retrospectives this week, so I thought you might find it interesting to know which articles on this blog were the most popular this year. Below you will find links to each article along with the page view count I got from Google Analytics:

1. A Simple Step-by-Step Reportlab Tutorial, 9,709 page views, posted 03/08/2010
2. Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial Part 1, 7,746 page views, posted 02/03/2010
3. Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial Part 2, 4,858 page views, posted 02/03/2010
4. Manipulating PDFs with Python and pyPdf, 4,511 page views, posted 05/15/2010
5. Python 101: Introspection, 4,473 page views, posted 10/14/2010
6. wxPython: Grid Tips and Tricks, 3,476 page views, posted 04/04/2010
7. wxPython: Creating a Simple MP3 Player, 3,401 page views, posted 04/20/2010
8. Python and Microsoft Office – Using PyWin32, 3,323 page views, posted 07/16/2010
9. wxPython and Threads, 3,183 page views, posted 05/22/2010

It would seem that SqlAlchemy and Reportlab are pretty popular topics. Are there any articles about either of these cool packages that you think I should write? As you can see, wxPython makes it into the top ten 3 times! What should I write about next regarding wxPython?

This upcoming year, I plan to write about some of the other GUI toolkits. Which one do you think I should do first? Tkinter, PySide, PyGUI or something else? What packages or standard libraries do you think I should cover? Feel free to let me know via the comments below or via my contact form (link at top). I’m looking forward to another year of Python tinkering and writing and I hope you are too! Thanks for your readership and encouragement this year!

Elixir is a lightweight declarative layer on top of SqlAlchemy that’s been around since 2006, well before SqlAlchemy released their own built-in Declarative syntax. Elixir was created by a collaboration between Jonathan LaCour, Daniel Haus and Gaëtan de Menten who had a passion for making SqlAlchemy even easier to use. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to to create our own database with Elixir and how to communicate with a pre-existing database. (more…)

Update (10/12/2010) – One of my alert readers told me that SqlAlchemy 0.6.x currently does NOT support the Access dialect. Read here for more info.

A year or two ago, I was asked to transfer some data from some old Microsoft Access files to our Microsoft SQL Server. Since I enjoy using SqlAlchemy, I decided to see if it supported Access. The documentation at the time was pretty unhelpful in this regard, but it did seem to be possible and I found one thread about it on SqlAlchemy’s Google group. (more…)

Accessing databases with Python is a simple process. Python even provides a sqlite database library that’s built into the main distribution (since 2.5). My favorite way to access databases with Python is to use the 3rd party package, SqlAlchemy. SqlAlchemy is an object-relational mapper (ORM), which means that it takes SQL constructs and makes them more like the target language. In this case, you end up using Python syntax to execute SQL rather than straight SQL and you can use the same code to access multiple database backends (if you’re careful).

In this article, we’re going to look at how to use SqlAlchemy to connect to pre-existing databases. If my experience is any indication, you’ll probably be spending more time working with databases that you didn’t create than with ones that you did. This article will show you how to connect to them. (more…)

In the first part of this series, we went over what some might call the “SQL Expression” method of using SqlAlchemy to interact with your database. The theory behind this is that we should learn the less abstract way of doing things before we get to the higher level (and more abstract) methods. This is true in many math classes, like Calculus where you learn the long way to find the standard deviation of some calulation before you learn about the shortcut.

For the second half, we will be doing what some might say is the easy way to use SqlAlchemy. It is known as the “Object Relational” method and the official documentation actually starts with it. This methodology takes a little longer to set up initially, but in many ways, it is also much easier to follow. (more…)

A long time ago (circa 2007 if Google serves me right), there was a Python programmer named Robin Munn who wrote a really nice tutorial on SqlAlchemy. It was originally based on the 0.1 release, but updated for the newer 0.2. Then, Mr. Munn just disappeared and the tutorial was never updated. I have been kicking around the idea of releasing my own version of this tutorial for quite some time and finally decided to just do it. I hope you will find this article helpful as I found the original to be. (more…)