SQLAlchemy Inheritance

Question

I'm a bit confused about inheritance under sqlalchemy, to the point where I'm not even sure what type of inheritance (single table, joined table, concrete) I should be using here. I've got a base class with some information that's shared amongst the subclasses, and some data that are completely separate. Sometimes, I'll want data from all the classes, and sometimes only from the subclasses. Here's an example:

class Building:
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

class Commercial(Building):
    def __init__(self, x, y, business):
        Building.__init__(self, x, y)
        self.business = business

class Residential(Building):
    def __init__(self, x, y, numResidents):
        Building.__init__(self, x, y, layer)
        self.numResidents = numResidents

How would I convert this to SQLAlchemy using declarative? How, then, would I query which buildings are within x>5 and y>3? Or which Residential buildings have only 1 resident?

Answer 1

Choosing how to represent the inheritance is mostly a database design issue. For performance single table inheritance is usually best. From a good database design point of view, joined table inheritance is better. Joined table inheritance enables you to have foreign keys to subclasses enforced by the database, it's a lot simpler to have non-null constraints for subclass fields. Concrete table inheritance is kind of worst of both worlds.

Single table inheritance setup with declarative looks like this:

class Building(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'building'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    building_type = Column(String(32), nullable=False)
    x = Column(Float, nullable=False)
    y = Column(Float, nullable=False)
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': building_type}

class Commercial(Building):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'commercial'}
    business = Column(String(50))

class Residential(Building):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'residential'}
    num_residents = Column(Integer)

To make it joined table inheritance, you'll need to add

__tablename__ = 'commercial'
id = Column(None, ForeignKey('building.id'), primary_key=True)

to the subclasses.

Querying is mostly the same with both approaches:

# buildings that are within x>5 and y>3
session.query(Building).filter((Building.x > 5) & (Building.y > 3))
# Residential buildings that have only 1 resident
session.query(Residential).filter(Residential.num_residents == 1)

To control which fields are loaded you can use the query.with_polymorphic() method.

The most important thing to think about using inheritance for the datamapping, is whether you actually need inheritance or can do with aggregation. Inheritance will be a pain if you will ever need to change the type of an building, or your buildings can have both commercial and residential aspects. In those cases it's usually better to have the commercial and residential aspects as related objects.