Don't require explicit `await database.connect()` about databases

[tomchristie]

Actually it's not obvious if that'd be best or not.

Forcing explicit connection is a good way to ensure correct setup. If we just lazily establish the connection pool, then eg. it's easier to accidentally omit startup/shutdown events when integrating databases with a web framework.

[tomchristie]

Anyways let's close this issue off. We're good as we are.

Thanks for the extra feedback on it! 😄

[vltr]

Just my two cents ...

Forcing explicit connection is a good way to ensure correct setup.

I agree. There was no single async service I made (either using Twisted or "now" with asyncio) that didn't required explicit connection handling in a use cycle ... Of course, you can always use the NullPoll with Postgres behind pgBounce, but not everyone deploys that strategy into production.

There are good patterns to be used out there to handle this, not to mention the @transaction and context managers already implemented to do that in the package. 👍

it's easier to accidentally omit startup/shutdown events when integrating databases with a web framework.

What do you mean? Leave a connection open after the request lifecycle is finished or leave the database open when shutting down the server (assuming it's an asyncio server) ?

[tomchristie]

I mean if we force explicit connects, then it's also more likely that users will remember to use explicit disconnects too.

(If your test cases make sure to startup/shutdown the web application then this ties in nicely with making sure that force_rollback runs at the end of every test case.)

Eg. in Starlette we'd expect users to integrate like so:

@app.on_event('startup')
async def startup():
    await database.connect()

@app.on_event('shutdown')
async def shutdown():
    await database.disconnect()

[vltr]

The example you gave is exactly what I had in mind (relative to asyncio servers). And no need to thank me, we really need some effort on this (databases, ORMs, etc). I would not say that we (developers) feel "abandoned" in the asyncio database special area, but the ecossystem is really not that rich when it comes to that. I hope this changes in the future 😉

[Congee]

Is there any existing option to enable lazy loading rather than me implementing it from scratch? 🤔