Tips and tricks

Here you will find help on performing some common tasks related to SQLAlchemy with Asphalt.

How to automatically print emitted SQL

This can be done in one of two ways:

1. Add the echo=True option to the engine configuration options

2. In your application’s configuration, add a logger for sqlalchemy.engine.base:

logging:
  root:
    handlers: [console]
    level: WARNING
  loggers:
    asphalt:
      level: INFO
    sqlalchemy.engine:
      level: INFO

See also

https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/14/core/engines.html#dbengine-logging

Handling schema migrations

For schema migrations, it is best to use the Alembic tool, which is made by SQLAlchemy’s author.

The tool should not be used from the application itself though, but instead run during your upgrade procedure before your new code has a chance to run. And as a reminder, if your application must not have downtime, the schema upgrade should be backwards compatible with the previous version.