jang

( looking downcast )

Having said that, my desktop was in place and working perfectly when I popped in last week to pre-install it, and everything that depends on the local sysadmin and/or the local IT support girl (who is a total fox, incidentally, and who invited me out to lunch on my first day) has been done in plenty of time with nary a hitch.

Oh, for what it's worth, I'm pretty much convinced that the right thing to do is to throw away Django's ORM in favour of SQLAlchemy, because it does all this - and so much more - out of the box. Yes, type discriminants are ugly; but they are a necessary evil if you want your ORM to go fast (the alternative is a bunch of speculative joins; an approach that SQLAlchemy supports for a single database round-trip). What we lose, principally, is the admin interface (for the bits that don't use Django's ORM), and perhaps some of the manage.py capability. But it still looks worth it..!