Django and NoSQL Databases Latest Status Update

Recently, in the Django and NoSQL databases revisited, I’ve covered the coordinated efforts for making Django a NoSQL friendly framework. Alex Gaynor, the main person behind this initiative having the support of the Django community, has ☞ published the final report of the GSOC project:

With this past week GSOC has officially come to it’s close, and I’m here to report on the status of the query-refactor. The original purpose of this branch was to do refactorings to the internals of the ORM, and produce a prototype backend for a non-relational database to demonstrate that this was a viable option. At this time far more work has gone into the latter half of the project, I have developed a fully functioning MongoDB backend, that demonstrates that possibility of using the ORM, almost unmodified on non-relational databases. However, some of the larger refactors that I was originally hoping to do have ultimately not happened, on the other hand they are evidentially not necessary for a functioning backend. At this time there are a number of outstanding tasks, such as: porting the ListField to work on Postgres, and completing the work on embedded documents.
However the largest open question is what of this work should be merged into trunk, and what should live external. My recommendation would be for any changes in Django itself to be merged, including the new form fields, but for the MongoDB backend (and, indeed, any future backends) to live external to Django, until such a time as it obtains a user base anywhere approaching our current backends, as well as a more individuals dedicated to maintaining it.

The guys over ☞ All Buttons Pressed also commented on the outcome of this project:

The biggest design issue (in my opinion) is how to handle AutoField. In the GSoC branch, non-relational model code would always need a manually added NativeAutoField(primary_key=True) because many NoSQL DBs use string-based primary keys. As you can see in Django-nonrel, a NativeAutoField is unnecessary. The normal AutoField already works very well and it has the advantage that you can reuse existing Django apps unmodified and you don’t need a special NativeAutoField definition in your model. Hopefully this issue will get fixed before official NoSQL support is merged into trunk.

Original title and link for this post: Django and NoSQL Databases Latest Status Update (published on the NoSQL blog: myNoSQL)