Flask-sqlalchemy query datetime intervals

Question

I have defined a table with flask-sqlalchemy. Displayed below.

class Notes(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    notes = db.Column(         


        

Answer 1

You can try something like

Notes.query.order_by(desc(Notes.added_at)).filter(
    Notes.added_at >= text('NOW() - INTERVAL 8 HOURS').limit(num)

As I only use pure sqlalchemy I tested this out with this syntax:

>>> from sqlalchemy import text
>>> # s is a standard sqlalchemy session created from elsewhere.
>>> print s.query(Notes).order_by(desc(Notes.added_at)).filter(
...     Notes.added_at >= text('NOW() - INTERVAL 8 HOURS'))
SELECT notes.id AS notes_id, notes.notes AS notes_notes, notes.added_at AS notes_added_at 
FROM notes 
WHERE notes.added_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL 8 HOURS ORDER BY notes.added_at DESC

Reason for using text for that section is simply because NOW() and INTERVAL usage is not consistent across all sql implementations (certain implementations require the use of DATEADD to do datetime arithmetic, and while sqlalchemy does support the Interval type it's not really well documented, and also on my brief testing with it it doesn't actually do what you needed (using example from this answer, for both sqlite and MySQL). If you intend to use the SQL backend as an ordered (but dumb) data store you can just construct the actual query from within Python, perhaps like so:

q = s.query(Notes).order_by(desc(Notes.added_at)).filter(
    Notes.added_at >= (datetime.utcnow() - timedelta(3600 * 8))
)

Some people dislike this as some databases (like postgresql) can deal with datetime better than Python (such as timedelta is ignorant of leap years, for instance).