Storm 0.18

The Storm team is proud to announce Storm 0.18!

The new release includes a number of new features:

 * Storm includes (optional) code to manage and migrate database schemas
 * storm.zope.testing added testresources
   (https://edge.launchpad.net/testresources) support
 * TimeoutErrors include messages to describe why the Timeout was raised

This release includes official packages for all supported releases
of Ubuntu except 10.10. 10.10 packages will be added after problems with
Storm's release machinery are sorted out. The packages are available in the
Storm team's PPA:

 https://edge.launchpad.net/~storm/+archive/ppa

You can find the release files at:

 https://launchpad.net/storm/+download

You can always get the latest source code from Launchpad:

 bzr branch lp:storm

Finally, you can join us in the #storm channel on irc.freenode.net
and on the Storm mailing list:

 https://lists.canonical.com/mailman/listinfo/storm

Read on for more...

Code to manage and migrate database schemas
-------------------------------------------

The new ``storm.schema`` package includes a generalized version of the code
used by the Landscape team for their schemas.

The ``Schema`` class can be used to ``create``, ``drop``, ``delete`` and
``upgrade`` database schemas. A ``Store`` may have a single schema. The
schema is defined by the series of SQL statements that should be used to
create, drop and clear the schema, respectively; and by a patch package used
to upgrade it.

A patch package is simply a Python package that contains files for each patch
level in the series. Each file must be named ``patch_N.py``, where ``N`` is
the numeric version of the patch in the series (using ascending natural
numbers). The patch files must define an ``apply`` callable taking a
``Store`` instance as its only argument. This will be called when the patch
gets applied.

Here's an example, where ``patch_package`` is a Python module
containing database patches used to upgrade the schema over time, and
``store`` is a Storm ``Store``:

>>> from storm.schema import Schema
>>> creates = ['CREATE TABLE person (id INTEGER, name TEXT)']
>>> drops = ['DROP TABLE person']
>>> deletes = ['DELETE FROM person']
>>> import patch_package
>>> schema = Schema(creates, drops, deletes, patch_package)
>>> schema.upgrade(store)

While you can use the schema's ``create`` method separately, ``upgrade`` is
sufficient alone. It will create the schema if it does not exist, and
otherwise will run unapplyed patches to an existing schema. Note that this
approach therefore expects the "creates" SQL (that is, the second line of the
example above) to be maintained alongside patches--it should be *equivalent*
to running all patches.

storm.zope.testing added testresources support
----------------------------------------------

If you would like to use testresources
(https://edge.launchpad.net/testresources) with your Storm tests, a
storm.zope.testing.ZStormResourceManager class to manage a set of stores
registered with ZStorm is now available. It can be used roughly like this::

    from testresources import ResourcedTestCase
    from storm.zope.testing import ZStormResourceManager
    from storm.schema import Schema

    name = "test"
    uri = "sqlite:"
    schema = Schema(...)
    manager = ZStormResourceManager({name: (uri, schema)})

    class MyTest(ResourcedTestCase):

        resources = [("zstorm", manager)]

        def test_stuff(self):
            store = self.zstorm.get("test")
            store.execute(...)

Comparable expressions (such as Column and Alias) provide new
startswith(), endswith() and contains_string() methods. These
methods perform prefix, suffix and substring comparisons using LIKE.
Strings used with these methods are automatically escaped.