One of the topics that popped up repeatedly at DjangoCon last weekend was how bad purely normalised table structures are, and how denormalisation is good for many things, including making your database cry less.
To that end, during the gaps in PyConUK this weekend, I decided to see how easy it would be to write a new Django field that will automatically denormalise a field in a related table across to another model.
There are not very many things that could tempt me to fly 10 hours twice for only a weekend, but DjangoCon was one of them, and I'm glad I went; it was one of the best weekends I've had for quite a while.
There were plenty of good talks; I can't mention them all here, since as we all know, bytes cost money, but in that vein I must at least mention Cal Henderson's talk 'Why I Hate Django' - a brilliantly done talk on the things Django's missing, as well as the fact we don't have a mascot (or do we?) and that we aren't smug enough.
The world of migrations in Django is definitely warming up now, and with that we're proud to announce the release of South 0.3, the 'intelligent django migrations app', available now from south.aeracode.org.
New in this release are the use of fields rather than dicts for specifying columns in migrations, so migrations now look cleaner, work with all the databases Django supports to a better extent, and even support custom fields.
Also new is dependencies between apps, for those situations where your forum app's Post depends on your accounts app's Profile; South will work out the right way to apply everything so foreign keys don't horribly break.