Great, thanks!


.oO V Oo.


On 09/06/2011 04:48 PM, Michael Bayer wrote:
On Sep 6, 2011, at 10:40 AM, Vlad K. wrote:

I have a products database which is daily syncronized with an external source 
via a csv file. There are several thousand rows in question. The 
synchronization does two things:

1. Update only price if changed for existing products
2. Insert new products if they don't exist with all fields from csv

But basically, for each row in the csv, after the row is processed (one of the 
above two things is done), I don't need the object in session anymore. Memory 
and performance are of course an issue, and I can't find a way to test memory 
consumption with or without expunge_all() so my questions are:

1. Do I need to session.expunge_all() after each csv row is processed, or are 
they automatically garbage collected?
2. Is there any significant overhead inherent in expunge_all() that I'm not 
seeing right now?

Performance-wise, it seems the task is complete in more or less same time with 
or without expunge_all()
In modern SQLAlchemy, the Session maintains only weak references to objects that are 
"clean", that is, are persistent in the database and have no pending changes to 
be flushed.    As all references to them are lost, they are garbage collected by the 
Python interpreter.    Note that objects are strongly referenced when they are present in 
the collection or attribute of a parent object, until that parent is also garbage 
collected.    There is an overhead to process which occurs when the object is 
dereferenced and removed from the session (weakref callbacks handle the accounting).  But 
calling expunge_all() probably isn't doing much here as the objects are likely being 
cleaned out in the same way regardless.

While I'm at it, I also need to delete rows in the database that do not have 
corresponding row in the csv file (say linked by csv_key field), the first 
solution that comes to mind is building a list of keys in the csv file (few 
thousand keys) and then doing:

session.query(Product).filter(not_(Product.product_id.in_(csv_keys))).delete()

I believe there is less overhead in sending such a large (but single!) query to 
the database and leaving it to determine what to delete by itself, than 
selecting each row in the database and checking if its csv_key exists in the 
csv_keys list on the application side and then issuing delete statements for 
rows that matched the criteria. Am I wrong?
That's definitely a dramatically faster way to do things, rather than to load each record 
individually and mark as deleted - it's the primary reason delete() and update() are 
there.   You'll probably want to send "False" as the value of 
synchronize_session to the delete() call so that it doesn't go through the effort of 
locating local records that were affected (unless you need that feature).


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