Friday, May 24, 2013

Django and sql azure, wtf?


Chapter 5 of the Django Book - Models

I thought about just skipping this one as I don't anticipate needing a db for the schedule app, but decided I might as well follow through, it'll probably come in handy soon enough.

So step 1 I created a sql database in azure to use, and now I need a sql engine for python.

I found https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-pyodbc-azure/1.0.5 which told me to install pyodbc first, which was googleable enough, and available for both 2.7 and 3.x. But the 2.7 version said it couldn't install bc I don't have 2.7 in the registry…hmm.  After some hints from Stack Overflow, I checked the python version I have for 2.7 and it's the 32 bit version, which won't be found by the 64 bit installer. Ran the 32 bit installer and done. Then it said to use pip to install itself, which I didn't have, but SO led me to this great page: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pip…but after running that, pip still wasn't recognised on the command line. Another useful note on SO said it installed to python/scripts instead of just to /python, so I had to add that to my path. And now I get 'failed to create process'. Tried in admin mode, same error. Google was initially not forthcoming about this error, but then turned up this: http://www.maphew.com/Python/python-fixit-snippets/ which suggested that it was unable to find python. Perhaps it is confused by my python27 option? The location certainly hasn't changed since I installed it. I uninstalled and reinstalled to be sure, but that didn't help.

Checking the Event Viewer to see where it's trying to find python might help -nope, can't see any relevant messages.

I went back and installed Distribute, as it is mentioned in the same place as where I got pip. No change.

I found this gui for pip that lets you switch between active python installers - that might help, because it could still be being caused by my dual 2 and 3 installation? https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/python/pip-for-windows but it also failed. But it did point out that I have no pip.exe in c:\python27 - which is odd because I do have a Removepip.exe? Turns out pip.exe is in c:\python27\scripts, but moving it just got me back to failed to create process. Hmmmmmm.

So I went back to the site, and noticed it had a downloadable zip. So I downloaded that, and ran setup.py install, and it appears to have installed something? But not a full package. In fact I can't even see a real pyodbc package...

But just to make sure it isn't installed, let's try following the instructions on the pyodbc-azure site. And nope, I get jango.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: 'sql_server.pyodbc' isn't an available database backend.
 
So, that was a couple of unproductive hours, and I give up. I will instead attempt to follow this tutorial (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/python/tutorials/web-app-with-blob-storage/) for connecting a python app to azure storage, which should be perfectly adequate for anything.  And to get through the Django book I can just go ahead and use sqllite.

Getting started with sqllite: http://sqlite.org/sqlite.html
Easy!
Quickly created and connected to a database, created a model, turned it into tables, added data to the tables, and started querying the data out of it
  • All rows
  • Filter: Field = x, field contains x (see Appendix C for field == x, or < x?)
  • Get(): A single object instead of a list ( filter returns a list) uses same options as filter
  • Order_by
  • Slicing - works just like a python list!
  • Use .update(x=1) instead of pub.name='a' to get more efficient sql translations (setting a field directly will cause all fields to be saved over)
  • .delete() can be called on an object or a query set (result of .filter()) Django tries to save you from accidentally deleting everyhting by requiring the odd syntax x.objects.all().delete() to do that
 

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