About refreshing objects in sqlalchemy session

I just had this issue and the existing solutions didn't work for me for some reason. What did work was to call session.commit(). After calling that, the object had the updated values from the database.

TL;DR Rather than working on Session synchronization, see if your task can be reasonably easily coded with SQLAlchemy Core syntax, directly on the Engine, without the use of (multiple) Sessions

For someone coming from SQL and JDBC experience, one critical thing to learn about SQLAlchemy, which, unfortunately, I didn't clearly come across reading through the multiple documents for months is that SQLAlchemy consists of two fundamentally different parts: the Core and the ORM. As the ORM documentation is listed first on the website and most examples use the ORM-like syntax, one gets thrown into working with it and sets them-self up for errors and confusion - if thinking about ORM in terms of SQL/JDBC. ORM uses its own abstraction layer that takes a complete control over how and when actual SQL statements are executed. The rule of thumb is that a Session is cheap to create and kill, and it should never be re-used for anything in the program's flow and logic that may cause re-querying, synchronization or multi-threading. On the other hand, the Core is the direct no-thrills SQL, very much like a JDBC Driver. There is one place in the docs I found that "suggests" using Core over ORM:

it is encouraged that simple SQL operations take place here, directly on the Connection, such as incrementing counters or inserting extra rows within log tables. When dealing with the Connection, it is expected that Core-level SQL operations will be used; e.g. those described in SQL Expression Language Tutorial.

Although, it appears that using a Connection causes the same side effect as using a Session: re-query of a specific record returns the same result as the first query, even if the record's content in the DB was changed. So, apparently Connections are as "unreliable" as Sessions to read DB content in "real time", but a direct Engine execution seems to be working fine as it picks a Connection object from the pool (assuming that the retrieved Connection would never be in the same "reuse" state relatively to the query as the specific open Connection). The Result object should be closed explicitly, as per SA docs

Run this, to force session to update latest value from your database of choice:

session.expire_all()

Excellent DOC about default behavior and lifespan of session

Sessions are designed to work like this. The attributes of the object in Session B WILL keep what it had when first queried in Session B. Additionally, SQLAlchemy will not attempt to automatically refresh objects in other sessions when they change, nor do I think it would be wise to try to create something like this.

You should be actively thinking of the lifespan of each session as a single transaction in the database. How and when sessions need to deal with the fact that their objects might be stale is not a technical problem that can be solved by an algorithm built into SQLAlchemy (or any extension for SQLAlchemy): it is a "business" problem whose solution you must determine and code yourself. The "correct" response might be to say that this isn't a problem: the logic that occurs with Session B could be valid if it used the data at the time that Session B started. Your "problem" might not actually be a problem. The docs actually have an entire section on when to use sessions, but it gives a pretty grim response if you are hoping for a one-size-fits-all solution...

A Session is typically constructed at the beginning of a logical operation where database access is potentially anticipated.

The Session, whenever it is used to talk to the database, begins a database transaction as soon as it starts communicating. Assuming the autocommit flag is left at its recommended default of False, this transaction remains in progress until the Session is rolled back, committed, or closed. The Session will begin a new transaction if it is used again, subsequent to the previous transaction ending; from this it follows that the Session is capable of having a lifespan across many transactions, though only one at a time. We refer to these two concepts as transaction scope and session scope.

The implication here is that the SQLAlchemy ORM is encouraging the developer to establish these two scopes in his or her application, including not only when the scopes begin and end, but also the expanse of those scopes, for example should a single Session instance be local to the execution flow within a function or method, should it be a global object used by the entire application, or somewhere in between these two.

The burden placed on the developer to determine this scope is one area where the SQLAlchemy ORM necessarily has a strong opinion about how the database should be used. The unit of work pattern is specifically one of accumulating changes over time and flushing them periodically, keeping in-memory state in sync with what’s known to be present in a local transaction. This pattern is only effective when meaningful transaction scopes are in place.

That said, there are a few things you can do to change how the situation works:

First, you can reduce how long your session stays open. Session B is querying the object, then later you are doing something with that object (in the same session) that you want to have the attributes be up to date. One solution is to have this second operation done in a separate session.

Another is to use the expire/refresh methods, as the docs show...

# immediately re-load attributes on obj1, obj2
session.refresh(obj1)
session.refresh(obj2)

# expire objects obj1, obj2, attributes will be reloaded
# on the next access:
session.expire(obj1)
session.expire(obj2)

You can use session.refresh() to immediately get an up-to-date version of the object, even if the session already queried the object earlier.