"""Example of caching objects in a per-session cache. This approach is faster in that objects don't need to be detached/remerged between sessions, but is slower in that the cache is empty at the start of each session's lifespan. """ from sqlalchemy.orm.query import Query, _generative from sqlalchemy.orm.session import Session class CachingQuery(Query): # generative method to set a "cache" key. The method of "keying" the cache # here can be made more sophisticated, such as caching based on the query._criterion. @_generative() def with_cache_key(self, cachekey): self.cachekey = cachekey def __iter__(self): if hasattr(self, 'cachekey'): try: cache = self.session._cache except AttributeError: self.session._cache = cache = {} try: ret = cache[self.cachekey] except KeyError: ret = list(Query.__iter__(self)) cache[self.cachekey] = ret return iter(ret) else: return Query.__iter__(self) # example usage if __name__ == '__main__': from sqlalchemy import Column, create_engine, Integer, String from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base Session = sessionmaker(query_cls=CachingQuery) Base = declarative_base(engine=create_engine('sqlite://', echo=True)) class User(Base): __tablename__ = 'users' id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True) name = Column(String(100)) def __repr__(self): return "User(name=%r)" % self.name Base.metadata.create_all() sess = Session() sess.add_all( [User(name='u1'), User(name='u2'), User(name='u3')] ) sess.commit() # cache two user objects sess.query(User).with_cache_key('u2andu3').filter(User.name.in_(['u2', 'u3'])).all() # pull straight from cache print sess.query(User).with_cache_key('u2andu3').all()