I made the stupid mistake of creating too many models in the same Django app, now I want to split it into 3 distinct ones. Problem is: there’s already data in production in two customers’ sites, so I need to carefully plan any schema/data migration to be done (I’m using django-south). I’m unsure on how to proceed, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
(I’m using PostgreSQL on a Ubuntu server 12.4 LTS, if that’s of any relevance)
I thought about using db.rename_table, but can’t figure out how to correctly update the foreign keys to those models (old to new) – irrelevant at the database level (since the table renaming already got that covered), but not so at the ORM level.
Update: after thinking about it, and after asking this question on programmmers.SE, I decided to keep things simple and don’t worry about migrations between major versions of the product. Short term, I’ll just use db.rename_table to match the new name, while also using db_table as Daniel Roseman suggested, all the while keeping the models in the old app. When upgrading to a major version, I swith to the new app and ditch all migrations altogether (so fresh installs of the new version will create the database “as-is” instead of going through all historical migrations).
I don’t see why you need any data migration at all.
Just move the models to the new app, and add a
db_tablesetting in the inner Meta classes to point to the old table names.