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DB2 support for Django is coming

Antonio Cangiano

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you!

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A few weeks after DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X was announced, I’m here to let you in on another great scoop. DB2 support for the Django web framework is going to be available soon to the community, under the permissive Apache 2.0 License. We are presently waiting for clearance from our lawyers, but the code has been written and tested, and Django is finally working with DB2. This comes on the heels of a new release of the Python driver for DB2, version 0.6.0, which adds full support for Unicode.

The Django community will soon be able to use the rock solid database management system which is DB2, and enjoy all the advantages that it provides. Would you like to introduce Django into your enterprise environment, where DB2 is already in use? If so, you’ll now have an easier time with this. Want to use DB2 as a competitive advantage for your startup? Now you can, whether you opt to use Django/Python, Rails/Ruby, Zend Framework/PHP or Perl.

I have been pushing for Django’s ORM support since 2006, and I distinctly remember the initial reactions of some people at IBM, they were along the lines of, “Djan… what?”. Unlike Rails, Django was much less known back then, especially among IT managers, and in all fairness, while powerful and very productive, the inherited Python philosophy that “explicit is better than implicit” made it look more complex – or at least less impressive – than Rails during 10 minute demos. But I insisted that it was important for our DB2 strategy and for the Django community, and now it’s finally a reality, thanks to the hard work of the IBM API team. Just like for Rails and Ruby, IBM will be the first and only vendor to officially support a Python driver, SQLAlchemy and Django’s ORM adapters.

I can’t help but think, what’s next? What language and/or framework truly needs some DB2 love? I’m definitely interested in a few languages and frameworks, and have already advocated for some of these as well, but I’d like to hear your opinions on this topic. I have created a poll that asks you which, among the technologies that we don’t currently support, do you think it would be most beneficial to have DB2 support for. Feel free to express your opinions in the comment section, as well as in the poll.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily represents the opinions of my employer, IBM. The poll is not an official IBM survey.

Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano is an Engineering Manager and AI Specialist at IBM. He authored Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009) and Technical Blogging (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2012, 2019). He is also the Marketing Lead for Cognitive Class, an educational initiative which he helped grow from zero to over 3 Million students. You can follow him on Twitter.

18 responses to “DB2 support for Django is coming”

  1. Alex

    I see you’ve chosen to release it under the Apache license. I’m not super familiar with licensing issues but should the Django devs decide they want to include the backend in Django itself would it be allowable to relicense it under the BSD license(as the rest of Django is).

  2. ludo

    Great job!

    Now we only need an officially supported MQ driver, and a CTG driver, both for Python of course. 🙂

  3. Antonio Cangiano

    I’m not 100% sure if the Apache License 2.0 is compatible with the BSD license. but I think it is. Here is the Wikipedia entry for the license: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License.

  4. Adam Derewecki

    I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about Drupal using DB2 — so much that I started modifying a MySQL driver to work for DB2 syntax. Unfortunately, when I upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy, DB2 Express-C broke in such a way that I couldn’t even uninstall it. I got really discouraged and went back to MySQL.

    So my vote is for someone to write a Drupal driver, and to do it right.

  5. Evandro Viana

    Great Job! very expected 🙂

  6. Jeff Self

    This is great news! Is this completely independent of the Django core team? Or did they get involved? I know I started a huge discussion on the django-developers google group last year regarding this and I know you got involved in it before the discussion was over.

    Did the Django team finally write the specs you said were needed? Or did the IBM lawyers allow you guys to view source code?

  7. Antonio Cangiano

    Hi Jeff, this is independent from the Django core team, who, as far as I know, didn’t provide any specs. The book Pro Django publishes specs for the ORM, but I’m not sure if the API team took advantage of it. I can ask, but I believe they took the “reverse engineering” route.

  8. Bruce Hobbs

    Seaside?

  9. Pythonista

    Great news.
    But.. when @ django SVN?

  10. Antonio Cangiano

    @Pythonista, see Jacob’s comment here.

  11. Robert

    I want to know what happened with this:

    “… We are presently waiting for **clearance from our lawyers**, but the code has been written and tested, and Django is finally working with DB2 … ”

    It was posted more than one month ago.

  12. Antonio Cangiano

    Robert, we are expecting a release by next week.

  13. Mario Briggs

    Rob,

    in the final round of testing on Mac OS X, we noticed memory leaks while running the Django regressions. We are tracking these leaks currently

  14. Gonçalo Ferreira

    Any news with those leaks?

  15. Wouter van Bommel

    Hi, is there an updated timeframe available for the django db2 driver?
    The original post is from frebruary and we are already in may without an release.

  16. Antonio Cangiano

    The Django adapter for DB2 will be released at the same time as DB2 9.7. 🙂

  17. driver indir

    great job men !

  18. Ambrish Bhargava

    The support is now live: http://groups.google.co.in/group/ibm_db/browse_thread/thread/b5437dc9609de109

    —
    Ambrish Bhargava

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