Re: Is there a plan for Django to handle NoSQL databases natively?

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Donnie Darko <gittestdev@gmail.com> wrote:

I really like Django. I've fiddled around a bit with Rails, but I personally prefer Django's logic. I also prefer Python over Ruby. Again, personal preferences. Despite all that, I am now switching back to Rails because of Django's lack of native support for databases like mongodb. I saw there was no plan for Django 1.5 to support NoSQL databases.

I've tried to install django-nonrel as it looked promising, but with no success. Even if I succeeded, I can't trust this fork of django considering the lack of active development. There isn't even a post to tell you what version of the dependencies to install, some of which are updating quite fast. So you run into errors that are not well-documented, and it's just an horror.

Django could be a long term investement for me, so I was wondering if there there was a plan to change Django's ORM to support NoSQL databases?

Are there any active plans to change the ORM? No.

Have we thought about it? Yes. A couple of years back, we had a Summer of Code project to add NoSQL support to the ORM. This got to the point of having a proof of concept implementation that worked -- but there were also some technical problems that were never resolved, and as a result the branch was never merged.

Django-nonrel was always an unofficial fork. AFAIK, the original developer is no longer maintaining the project; I'm not aware if someone else has picked up the maintenance burden.

However - it's not all gloom and doom. 

Firstly, you can still use NoSQL data stores in a Django app - you just don't get anything to do with Models. Django is Python, so if there's a Python API for MongoDB, you can call that API in you Django view code. You can still use Forms (but not ModelForms), URL routing, and many other parts of Django - you just can't use anything that depends on Models.

Secondly, there's one approach to NoSQL that hasn't been investigated at all that might yield a result -- duck typing. This is Python, and in most cases the API doesn't care if you *actually* have a Django model - it just needs to quack like one -- and depending on your needs, it may not be that hard to construct an object that quacks enough like a Django model to use it with ModelForms or Admin. This sort of API wrapper is something that could be developed externally to the Django project -- again, as long as your wrapper quacks the right way, it should be possible to make it compatible.

Yours,

Russ Magee %-)

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