Article / 5th Dec 2008

South So Far

It's been a while since I last talked about South, so it's about time I did a short update, I think. There's been a fair few things going on since last time, which was, err, a long time ago.

Firstly, we now have SQLite support (apart from column renames/alters/deletes; I'll be implementing those with the appropriate workarounds soon). This was one of the features I most wanted to roll in, since SQLite is quite widely used for quick development. SQL Server support is also on the way soon!

Also in the news, TWiD's latest episode has some interesting poll results for schema migrations; of the respondents, over half are using one of the premade tools, and of those about 2/5 are using South - good news for the migration camp overall, and a surprisingly high amount for South, considering I have a limited picture of who's using it.

Other news includes startmigration getting support for multi-table inheritance (finally), some nice new work on indexes to flesh out the database API, and plenty of bugfixes and small tweaks to make things flow more smoothly.

Also in the pipeline is the possibility of adding an option to send post_syncdb signals at the end; several people have asked for this, and for some coding styles it will greatly reduce headaches about functions running too early in the migrations.

Finally, 0.4 will probably be released at some point soon, so keep a look out!