iceaxe

A modern, fast ORM for Python. We have the following goals:

• 🏎️ Performance: We want to exceed or match the fastest ORMs in Python. We want our ORM to be as close as possible to raw-asyncpg speeds. See the "Benchmarks" section for more.
• 📝 Typehinting: Everything should be typehinted with expected types. Declare your data as you expect in Python and it should bidirectionally sync to the database.
• 🐘 Postgres only: Leverage native Postgres features and simplify the implementation.
• ⚡ Common things are easy, rare things are possible: 99% of the SQL queries we write are vanilla SELECT/INSERT/UPDATEs. These should be natively supported by your ORM. If you're writing really complex queries, these are better done by hand so you can see exactly what SQL will be run.

Iceaxe is used in production at several companies. It's also an independent project. It's compatible with the Mountaineer ecosystem, but you can use it in whatever project and web framework you're using.

For comprehensive documentation, visit https://iceaxe.sh.

To auto-optimize your self hosted Postgres install, check out our new autopg project.

Installation

If you're using poetry to manage your dependencies:

uv add iceaxe

Otherwise install with pip:

pip install iceaxe

Usage

Define your models as a TableBase subclass:

from iceaxe import TableBase

class Person(TableBase):
    id: int
    name: str
    age: int

TableBase is a subclass of Pydantic's BaseModel, so you get all of the validation and Field customization out of the box. We provide our own Field constructor that adds database-specific configuration. For instance, to make the id field a primary key / auto-incrementing you can do:

from iceaxe import Field

class Person(TableBase):
    id: int = Field(primary_key=True)
    name: str
    age: int

Okay now you have a model. How do you interact with it?

Databases are based on a few core primitives to insert data, update it, and fetch it out again. To do so you'll need a database connection, which is a connection over the network from your code to your Postgres database. The DBConnection is the core class for all ORM actions against the database.

from iceaxe import DBConnection
import asyncpg

conn = DBConnection(
    await asyncpg.connect(
        host="localhost",
        port=5432,
        user="db_user",
        password="yoursecretpassword",
        database="your_db",
    )
)

The Person class currently just lives in memory. To back it with a full database table, we can run raw SQL or run a migration to add it:

await conn.conn.execute(
    """
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS person (
        id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
        name TEXT NOT NULL,
        age INT NOT NULL
    )
    """
)

Magic Migrations

For local development or side projects, you can use magic_migrate to automatically sync your database schema with your models:

await conn.magic_migrate("my_project")

This will:

1. Compare your current database schema against your model definitions
2. Generate a migration file if changes are detected
3. Apply all pending migrations

The migration files are written to your package's migrations/ folder, giving you a history of schema changes.

Recommended workflow for production:

While magic_migrate is convenient for rapid local iteration, we recommend a more controlled approach before merging to production:

1. Iterate freely during development using magic_migrate
2. Before merging, reset your database to the production schema state
3. Run uv run migrate generate once to generate a single, clean migration file
4. Commit this migration file with your PR

This ensures your production migrations are clean and reviewable, while still giving you the speed of automatic migrations during development.

Inserting Data

Instantiate object classes as you normally do:

people = [
    Person(name="Alice", age=30),
    Person(name="Bob", age=40),
    Person(name="Charlie", age=50),
]
await conn.insert(people)

print(people[0].id) # 1
print(people[1].id) # 2

Because we're using an auto-incrementing primary key, the id field will be populated after the insert. Iceaxe will automatically update the object in place with the newly assigned value.

Updating data

Now that we have these lovely people, let's modify them.

person = people[0]
person.name = "Blice"

Right now, we have a Python object that's out of state with the database. But that's often okay. We can inspect it and further write logic - it's fully decoupled from the database.

def ensure_b_letter(person: Person):
    if person.name[0].lower() != "b":
        raise ValueError("Name must start with 'B'")

ensure_b_letter(person)

To sync the values back to the database, we can call update:

await conn.update([person])

If we were to query the database directly, we see that the name has been updated:

id | name  | age
----+-------+-----
  1 | Blice |  31
  2 | Bob   |  40
  3 | Charlie | 50

But no other fields have been touched. This lets a potentially concurrent process modify Alice's record - say, updating the age to 31. By the time we update the data, we'll change the name but nothing else. Under the hood we do this by tracking the fields that have been modified in-memory and creating a targeted UPDATE to modify only those values.

Selecting data

To select data, we can use a QueryBuilder. For a shortcut to select query functions, you can also just import select directly. This method takes the desired value parameters and returns a list of the desired objects.

from iceaxe import select

query = select(Person).where(Person.name == "Blice", Person.age > 25)
results = await conn.exec(query)

If we inspect the typing of results, we see that it's a list[Person] objects. This matches the typehint of the select function. You can also target columns directly:

query = select((Person.id, Person.name)).where(Person.age > 25)
results = await conn.exec(query)

This will return a list of tuples, where each tuple is the id and name of the person: list[tuple[int, str]].

We support most of the common SQL operations. Just like the results, these are typehinted to their proper types as well. Static typecheckers and your IDE will throw an error if you try to compare a string column to an integer, for instance. A more complex example of a query:

query = select((
    Person.id,
    FavoriteColor,
)).join(
    FavoriteColor,
    Person.id == FavoriteColor.person_id,
).where(
    Person.age > 25,
    Person.name == "Blice",
).order_by(
    Person.age.desc(),
).limit(10)
results = await conn.exec(query)

As expected this will deliver results - and typehint - as a list[tuple[int, FavoriteColor]]

Production

Note that underlying Postgres connection wrapped by conn will be alive for as long as your object is in memory. This uses up one of the allowable connections to your database. Your overall limit depends on your Postgres configuration or hosting provider, but most managed solutions top out around 150-300. If you need more concurrent clients connected (and even if you don't - connection creation at the Postgres level is expensive), you can adopt a load balancer like pgbouncer to better scale to traffic. More deployment notes to come.

It's also worth noting the absence of request pooling in this initialization. This is a feature of many ORMs that lets you limit the overall connections you make to Postgres, and re-use these over time. We specifically don't offer request pooling as part of Iceaxe, despite being supported by our underlying engine asyncpg. This is a bit more aligned to how things should be structured in production. Python apps are always bound to one process thanks to the GIL. So no matter what your connection pool will always be tied to the current Python process / runtime. When you're deploying onto a server with multiple cores, the pool will be duplicated across CPUs and largely defeats the purpose of capping network connections in the first place.

Benchmarking

We have basic benchmarking tests in the __tests__/benchmarks directory. To run them, you'll need to execute the pytest suite:

uv run pytest -m integration_tests

Current benchmarking as of October 11 2024 is:

| | raw asyncpg | iceaxe | external overhead | | |-------------------|-------------|--------|-----------------------------------------------|---| | TableBase columns | 0.098s | 0.093s | | | | TableBase full | 0.164s | 1.345s | 10%: dict construction | 90%: pydantic overhead | |

Development

If you update your Cython implementation during development, you'll need to re-compile the Cython code. This can be done with a simple uv sync.

uv sync