If you ever had to maintain a traffic heavy Django site, you probably had to deal with graceful migrations. In the article I explain what atomic and reversible migrations are, how to execute "raw" SQL in migrations the right way, and how using a little known migration command we can completely alter the Django migrations built-in behavior.
How we cut a heavy admin dashboard response time in half with advanced SQL and some Django hackery. I recently had the pleasure of optimizing an old dashboard. The solution we came up with required some advanced SQL that Django does not support out of the box. In this article I present the solution, how we got to it, and a word of caution.
I started writing about two years ago. Back then, I used to read a lot on Medium. When I finally felt the urge to write something, it made sense to publish there as well. Medium provided me with a platform, an audience, and constant reinforcements in the form of stats, likes and comments. It motivated me to keep writing. Despite it's many advantages, I feel Medium is lacking in some areas.
Modeling polymorphism in relational databases is a challenging task. In this article, we present several modeling techniques to represent polymorphic objects in a relational database using the Django object-relational mapping (ORM).
A while back we started getting alerts in the middle of the night on low disk space. A quick investigation led us to one of our ETL tasks. Every night the task was fired to eliminate duplicate dumps, and free up some space. This is a short story about how we found our silver bullet and solved the issue without adding a single byte of storage.
I often talk about making Django scale but what does it actually mean? It means getting consistent performance regardless of the amount of data. In this article we tackle The last nail in Django admin's scalability coffin - the paginator.
Common table expressions, also known as the WITH clause, are a very useful feature. They help break down big queries into smaller pieces which makes it easier to read and understand. But, when used incorrectly they can cause a significant performance hit.
Every team has a unique development style. Some teams implement localization and require translations. Some teams are more sensitive to database issues and require more careful handling of indexes and constraints. In this article we describe how we enforce our own development style using the Django check framework, the inspect and the ast modules from the Python standard library.
ORMs offer great utility for developers but abstracting access to the database has its costs. Developers who are willing to poke around the database and change some defaults often find that great improvements can be made.
Django Admin search fields are great, throw a bunch of fields in search_fields and Django will handle the rest. The problem with search field begins when there are too many of them. This is how we replaced Django search with text filters for specific fields, and made Django admin much faster.