Question

I’m new to Django (and databases in general), and I’m not sure how to structure the following. The sources of data I’ll have for my site are:

1. a blog
2. for a few different games:
   • a high score list
   • user-created levels

If I were storing the data in ordinary files, I’d just have one file for each of the above. In Django, ideally (I think) I’d have a separate database for each of these, but apparently multiple database support isn’t there for Django yet. I’m worried (unnecessarily?) about keeping everything in one database for two reasons:

1. If I screw something up in one of the sections, I don’t want to mess up the rest of the data.

2. When I’m working on one of these sections, I’d like the freedom to easily change the model around. Since I’ve learned that syncdb doesn’t, in fact, sync the database, I’ve decided that the easiest thing to do when messing around with a model is to simply wipe the database and start over. Again, I’m worried about messing up the other sections. I looked at south, and it seems like more trouble than it’s worth during the planning stages of an app (but I’ll reconsider later when there’s actually valuable data).

Part of the problem is that I’m not really comfortable keeping my data in a binary format. I’m used to text, so I can easily diff it, modify it in an editor, etc., without going through some magical database interface (I’m using postgresql, by the way).

Are my fears unfounded? How do people normally handle this problem?

Answer 1

For what it’s worth, I totally understand your frustration as I went through a really similar thought process when starting. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do (easily, anyway) besides get familiar with the tools you’ll be using.

First of all, you don’t need multiple databases for what you’re doing – one will do. Each app will create its own tables in the database which are somewhat isolated from one another. As czarchaic mentioned, you can do python manage.py reset app_name to reset just one of them in case you change your model. You will lose that data, though.

To get data in relatively easy to work with format, you can use the command python manage.py dumpdata > file_name.json, and then to reload it later python manage.py loaddata file_name.json. You can use this for backups, local test data, or as a poor man’s migration (hint: South would be easier).

Yet another option is to use a NoSQL database for any data you think will need extra flexibility. Just keep in mind that Django doesn’t have support for any of these at the moment. That means no no admin support or ModelForms. Of course, having a model may become unnecessary.