Tuples in the Pythonic, TTM-inspired interface to PostgreSQL

The Third Manifesto formally describes tuple types (RM prescription 6), tuple values (prescription 9), tuple variables (prescription 12) as well as other tuple-related elements. As mentioned in the previous post, a tuple value is a set of ordered triples each consisting of attribute name, type and value.

Class Tuple of the TTM-inspired interface to PostgreSQL models TTM tuples as Python lists of TTM Attribute objects. Lists were used rather than sets because for many practical purposes the order of the attributes is useful (or has “meaning”), e.g., the first attribute listed is most often –even in purist relational theory presentations– the primary key or part of the primary key.

The interface stores the Tuple heading as a (Python) n-tuple of name-type tuples, in the “internal use” _heading attribute. The n-tuple was chosen over a list due to its immutability. The interface also sets each Attribute as a Python attribute of the Tuple object. Thus, if you define a Tuple variable as follows:

film = Tuple([
    Attribute('id', int, sysdefault=True),
    Attribute('title'),
    Attribute('release_year', int)])

You can then assign or access an Attribute using simple Python syntax:

film.title = "Seven Samurai"
if film.year == 1954:
    do something

The interface also stores two other internal use lists, one for nullable attributes and another for attributes that allow default values. These are to be used by upstream classes such as RelVar.

Class Tuple has a __setattr__ method tailored to deal with assignment to TTM Attributes. It disallows assignment to internal attributes after initialization, with one exception: the _tuple_version attribute (used by RelVar for optimistic concurrency). It also doesn’t allow assignment to undefined Attributes, e.g., given the film variable above, attempting to assign to film.length will raise an AttributeError. Finally, the assignment is “filtered” through class Attribute, so that an attempt such as film.title = 8.5 will result in a ValueError from that class.

The pyrseas.relation.tuple module defines a standalone function: tuple_values_dict. This is used to generate a dictionary of attribute values suitable for passing to Psycopg’s cursor.execute method. For INSERT, a single currtuple argument is expected. For UPDATE, the modified Tuple is passed as a second argument and tuple_values_dict will return a dictionary solely for the attribute and values that have changed.