Hi Joe, There is a "schema evolution" project underway to address this problem in a more automated way, here is background on the project:
http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SchemaEvolution but I don't know anything about the status of it. But to respond to your question, I have two projects where I've run into this and I've dealt with it in two different ways. In the first case, I'm building a database to support various internal applications for the hedge fund I work at. So far, all of the data is imported from external sources (mostly read-only db) such as files, other databases, web scraping, etc. Thus I can regenerate the entire database by re-importing the data. So I wrote a 'makedb.py' script which: 1. backs up the database (table by table) 2. drops and re-creates the database 3. calls manage.py syncdb to rebuild the django tables 4. runs all my import tasks to re-load the data When I make changes to models, I simply have to run this (and possibly update the parsing/loading code). The few tables that are read-write are just restored from the backup scripts I created in step 1. The only tweaking required is when one of those tables changes and most of the time MySQL will just get it right (if your new columns are not required). Ocassionally, I need to tweak the backup SQL before restoring it. The second project is my personal site which consists of a blog and to-do app. For these I just have to write the 'alter table' statements directly to get them in sync. That's what most people have been doing. Sometimes you have to do a few round trips to get it right. For example, if you want to add a non-null field to a model and there isn't an easy way to describe its default value in the model API, you can create the column in the DB as null-able (with alter table) then write a script (SQL or Python) to populate the column, then use an alter table statement again to make it non-null. -Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
