id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
16752	Multi-db without a 'default' database	Jeremy Dunck		"In the [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db multi-db doc] it says:
{{{
If you don’t have a default database, you need to be careful to always specify the database that you want to use.
}}}

I have a project where that is exactly the behavior I'd prefer - I want to explicitly route every call and have nothing go to the 'default' database.

However, when I removed the 'default' key from DATABASES (and hard-coded a router to always return a different value), model validation failed.  This seems to be because it imports
{{{
from django.db import connection
}}}
then proceeds to validation the schema against that connection (which is, in fact, the nonexistent 'default').  This fails as soon as an operation is called on the connection.

There is a second problem with this -- all model validation occurs against the default connection rather than the connection that the model will be routed to.  That seems like a bug, but I'd like to treat it separately.

My intention with this ticket is to establish: do we intend projects to work without a 'default' project, as implied by the docs, or is a 'default' database always assumed?

"	Bug	new	Database layer (models, ORM)	1.3	Normal			eng@…	Accepted	0	0	0	0	0	0