News and Updates

SQLAlchemy 0.7.8 is released. This is a maintenance release containing significant bug fixes applied to both the 0.7 and 0.8 SQLAlchemy series.

Significant issues resolved include a memory leak identified when the C extensions were installed in conjunction with usage of the Pyodbc DBAPI driver, and possibly other drivers that use a custom non-tuple for result rows; as well as a Python 3 issue where the execute() method of Engine and Connection would not interpret positional arguments correctly. Users who are using the Pyodbc driver in conjunction with the C extensions on any platform are encouraged to upgrade.

There's also a new dialect added that should allow usage of the new MySQL service provided by Google App Engine.

Overall, 0.7.8 has few changes versus 0.7.7, particularly within the ORM component, save for a few fixes. Users are advised to fully test existing applications before upgrading in any case.

For a full list of changes including all bug fixes, see CHANGES.

Download SQLAlchemy 0.7.8 on the download page.

I'm very pleased to announce that The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume II is now available. The AOSA volumes feature in-depth discussions of various open source applications, including Berkeley DB, Sendmail, and Git. Volume II includes my own contributed chapter which I wrote over the course of many weeks last year.

In my chapter, SQLAlchemy, I cover from a software development perspective how the various pieces of SQLAlchemy were conceived and how they fit together. The history of major architectural decisions as well as influencing software are also discussed. Users of SQLAlchemy are encouraged to gain a deeper perspective over how SQLAlchemy came to be the way it is by reading this chapter.

I highly recommend purchasing the book directly from Lulu.com. When purchasing from Lulu, all royalties are donated to Amnesty International. The full text of the book is also available for free on the website directly.

SQLAlchemy 0.7.7 is now available. This is the first release of the 0.7 series subsequent to the promotion of the 0.8 series to trunk. It nearly two dozen bug fixes and features, including some significant ORM issues that have been resolved.

Development is now proceeding with the 0.8 series, which begins to push 0.7 into maintenance mode. Bug fixes and some features are being backported to 0.7 as is possible. The 0.6 series also launches 0.6.9 at the same time as 0.7.7, in an effort to "push out" all the pending fixes for both the 0.6 and 0.7 series, so that development on 0.8 can continue.

While changes from 0.7.6 to 0.7.7 are intended to be fully backwards compatible, existing installations running on 0.7 should refer to the CHANGES file to determine if and how they may be impacted by the fixes in 0.7.7 before upgrading, and users are advised to fully test their applications against 0.7.7 before promoting to production.

For a full list of changes including all bug fixes, see CHANGES.

Download SQLAlchemy 0.7.7 on the download page.

SQLAlchemy 0.6.9, a maintenance release of the 0.6 branch, is now available.

The 0.6 series has not seen a release since 0.6.8 was released nearly a year ago. During that time, the 0.7 series has gone through over six releases, gaining many new features and bug fixes. A portion of these fixes have been backported to 0.6 since 0.6.8, including twelve ORM fixes, so 0.6.9 is an effort to make these fixes widely available to those installations who have not yet upgraded to 0.7. The release coincides at the same time as release 0.7.7, which is also fast approaching maintenance-only mode with 0.8 now well underway and close to initial beta releases.

Care has been taken in 0.6.9 to minimize as much as possible the potential for backwards-incompatibilities with existing code, which sometimes can occur if an application is unknowingly relying upon a buggy behavior that is then fixed. So while 0.6.9 is a very conservative release, it does still represent changes over a year's time; users are strongly urged to carefully review the CHANGES file to see exactly what's been adjusted, and to test it fully in their existing 0.6 applications before promoting it to production.

For a full list of changes including all bug fixes, see CHANGES.

Download SQLAlchemy 0.6.9 on the download page.

The What's new in 0.8 document is now published on the wiki. The work for 0.8 is around 70% completed with the majority of "hard" reworkings finished, broken up among various patches and Bitbucket repositories at the moment but soon to be merged into a comprehensive 0.8 tree that will ultimately push 0.7 into a maintenance branch.

0.8 so far has overall fewer changes than any previous major version, though a few are significant. It's very likely that 0.8 will pick up a bunch more changes before it lands its first beta release.

So far, the version is set to be called 0.8 but there's at least some possibility it could be called 1.0 - stay tuned for news on that !

0.8 Migration