Prefix for django table names

[Brendan O'Connor <brenocon@…>]

It's mentioned at ​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/legacy_databases/ you can't change the names of the django tables in the database.

Proposal: use a prefix, like "_dj_", for all those tables. So you'd have in the database:

_dj_sites
_dj_packages
_dj_content_types

etc.

This would make browsing your schema easier, since your application-specific schemas wouldn't be interspersed with django-specific metasystem tables in an alphabetical listing. It would also make migrating from legacy databases easier, or interoperation with non-django systems, or indeed any operation that requires direct use of the DB.

[Adrian Holovaty]

Yeah, we've considered this, but it's a bit too late at this point to rename those.

[Brendan O'Connor <brenocon@…>]

Seems like it's a matter of going through the list of tablenames, and for each one running a massive find-and-replace, taking care not to bork those strings when they're appearing in places outside SQL... right?

I've done things like this before with grep and emacs, and there are IDE's that do it very nicely. I could give it a spin if someone who knows the code better could help out testing the patch.