memory-efficient built-in SqlAlchemy iterator/generator?

In the spirit of Joel's answer, I use the following:

WINDOW_SIZE = 1000
def qgen(query):
    start = 0
    while True:
        stop = start + WINDOW_SIZE
        things = query.slice(start, stop).all()
        if len(things) == 0:
            break
        for thing in things:
            yield thing
        start += WINDOW_SIZE

Most DBAPI implementations fully buffer rows as they are fetched - so usually, before the SQLAlchemy ORM even gets a hold of one result, the whole result set is in memory.

But then, the way Query works is that it fully loads the given result set by default before returning to you your objects. The rationale here regards queries that are more than simple SELECT statements. For example, in joins to other tables that may return the same object identity multiple times in one result set (common with eager loading), the full set of rows needs to be in memory so that the correct results can be returned otherwise collections and such might be only partially populated.

So Query offers an option to change this behavior through yield_per(). This call will cause the Query to yield rows in batches, where you give it the batch size. As the docs state, this is only appropriate if you aren't doing any kind of eager loading of collections so it's basically if you really know what you're doing. Also, if the underlying DBAPI pre-buffers rows, there will still be that memory overhead so the approach only scales slightly better than not using it.

I hardly ever use yield_per(); instead, I use a better version of the LIMIT approach you suggest above using window functions. LIMIT and OFFSET have a huge problem that very large OFFSET values cause the query to get slower and slower, as an OFFSET of N causes it to page through N rows - it's like doing the same query fifty times instead of one, each time reading a larger and larger number of rows. With a window-function approach, I pre-fetch a set of "window" values that refer to chunks of the table I want to select. I then emit individual SELECT statements that each pull from one of those windows at a time.

The window function approach is on the wiki and I use it with great success.

Also note: not all databases support window functions; you need Postgresql, Oracle, or SQL Server. IMHO using at least Postgresql is definitely worth it - if you're using a relational database, you might as well use the best.

I am not a database expert, but when using SQLAlchemy as a simple Python abstraction layer (ie, not using the ORM Query object) I've came up with a satisfying solution to query a 300M-row table without exploding memory usage...

Here is a dummy example:

from sqlalchemy import create_engine, select

conn = create_engine("DB URL...").connect()
q = select([huge_table])

proxy = conn.execution_options(stream_results=True).execute(q)

Then, I use the SQLAlchemy fetchmany() method to iterate over the results in a infinite while loop:

while 'batch not empty':  # equivalent of 'while True', but clearer
    batch = proxy.fetchmany(100000)  # 100,000 rows at a time

    if not batch:
        break

    for row in batch:
        # Do your stuff here...

proxy.close()

This method allowed me to do all kind of data aggregation without any dangerous memory overhead.

NOTE the stream_results works with Postgres and the pyscopg2 adapter, but I guess it won't work with any DBAPI, nor with any database driver...

There is an interesting usecase in this blog post that inspired my above method.

I've been looking into efficient traversal/paging with SQLAlchemy and would like to update this answer.

I think you can use the slice call to properly limit the scope of a query and you could efficiently reuse it.

Example:

window_size = 10  # or whatever limit you like
window_idx = 0
while True:
    start,stop = window_size*window_idx, window_size*(window_idx+1)
    things = query.slice(start, stop).all()
    if things is None:
        break
    for thing in things:
        analyze(thing)
    if len(things) < window_size:
        break
    window_idx += 1