Open Stack

Hello all -

As mentioned previously, SQLAlchemy 1.1 has now been released for about 
six months.   My work now is on SQLAlchemy 1.2 which should hopefully 
see initial releases in late spring.    SQLAlchemy 1.1 includes tons of 
features, bugfixes, and improvements, and in particular the most recent 
versions contain some critical performance improvements focused around 
the "joined eager loading" feature, most typically encountered when an 
application makes many, many queries for small, single-row result sets 
with lots of joined eager loading.   In other words, exactly the kinds 
of queries that Openstack applications do a lot; the fixes here were 
identified as a direct result of Neutron query profiling by myself and a 
few other contributors.

For many weeks now, various patches to attempt to bump requirements for 
SQLAlchemy 1.1 have been languishing with little interest, and I do not 
have enough knowledge of the requirements system to get exactly the 
correct patch that will accomplish the goal (nor do others).  The 
current gerrit is at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/423192/, where you 
can see that not just me, but a bunch of folks, have no idea what 
incantations we need to put here that will make this happen.  Tony 
Breeds has chimed in thusly:

> To get this in we'll need to remove the cap in global-requirements
*and* at the same time add a heap of entries to 
upper-constratints-xfails.txt. this will allow us to merge the cap 
removal and keep the constraint in the 1.0 family while we wait for the 
requirements sync to propagate out.

I'm not readily familiar with what goes into upper-constraints-xfails 
and this file does not appear to be documented in common places like 
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Requirements or 
https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/requirements/tree/README.rst .

I'm asking on the list here for some assistance in moving this forward. 
SQLAlchemy development these days is closely attuned to the needs of 
Openstack now, a series of Openstack test suites are part of 
SQLAlchemy's own CI servers to ensure backwards compatibility with all 
changes, and 1.2 will have even more features that are directly 
consumable by oslo.db (features everyone will want, I promise you). 
Being able to bump requirements across Openstack so that new versions 
can be tested and integrated in a timely manner would be very helpful.

Thanks for reading!