SQLAlchemy: How to do Table Reflection and MySQL?

[Nick Sabalausky]

Hi, I'm fairly new to Python, and I'm trying to figure out how to use
SQLAlchemy to connect to a MySQL DB and use table reflection to set up
SQLAlchemy's tables. But the SQLAlchemy documentation is gigantic and
frankly kinda making my head spin, so I'm having trouble even finding
any information on how to use its table reflection, mostly just that it
exists and *can* be done, but not so much "how". My web searching has
just been turning up examples of SQLite and manually describing the
tables in Python and having SQLAlchemy create the tables, which isn't
what I'm looking for.

Is there a simple way to do this somehow? To just connect to a MySQL DB
and use table reflection?

 

[darnold]

Hi, I'm fairly new to Python, and I'm trying to figure out how to use
SQLAlchemy to connect to a MySQL DB and use table reflection to set up
SQLAlchemy's tables. But the  SQLAlchemy documentation is gigantic and
frankly kinda making my head spin, so I'm having trouble even finding
any information on how to use its table reflection, mostly just that it
exists and *can* be done, but not so much "how". My web searching has
just been turning up examples of SQLite and manually describing the
tables in Python and having SQLAlchemy create the tables, which isn't
what I'm looking for.

Is there a simple way to do this somehow? To just connect to a MySQL DB
and use table reflection?

i'm not brave enough to dig too deeply into SQLAlchemy, but maybe this
will help? :

http://kashififtikhar.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-sqlalchemy-reflection-with-pylons.html

that came up from googling "sqlalchemy table reflection tutorial".

 

[Nick Sabalausky]

i'm not brave enough to dig too deeply into SQLAlchemy, but maybe this
will help? :

http://kashififtikhar.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-sqlalchemy-reflection-with-pylons.html

that came up from googling "sqlalchemy table reflection tutorial".

Thanks, your view of Google seems to be far better tailored for Python
than mine is, that doesn't come up for me anywhere on the first five
pages of results for that query.

Unfortunately the info on that page doesn't seem to work for me:

----------------------------------
from sqlalchemy import *
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

engine = create_engine(my connection string)
meta = MetaData()
meta.bind = engine
meta.reflect()

Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
session = Session()

res = session.query(user).filter(user.name=="bert").first()
print res.name
----------------------------------

That just gives me:

NameError: name 'user' is not defined

(And yes, the code given on that page to print out the table info
*does* indicate a table named 'user' was found.)

I also tried this which also fails:

res =
session.query(meta.tables["user"]).filter(meta.tables["user"].name=="bert").first()

sqlalchemy.exc.ArgumentError: filter() argument must be of type
sqlalchemy.sql.ClauseElement or string

The page you linked to appears to get around the matter by manually
setting up tables filled with the reflected info, but that seems to
defeat much of the point for me. I may as well just set up the tables
manually without the reflection, which is what I'll probably do.

Maybe I just misunderstood what was meant in the SQLAlchemy docs here?:

"but note that SA can also “import†whole sets of Table objects
automatically from an existing database (this process is called table
reflection)." --
http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_7/core/tutorial.html

It said that but then didn't say how and didn't link to any info on how.

 

[Nick Sabalausky]

This does not seem to be a SQLAlchemy problem. Instead it seems
there is not a variable called `name`.

Oops, yea, it's supposed to be:

meta.tables["user"].columns["name"]

Not:

meta.tables["user"].name

Works now, thanks all.