Database backends

The purpose of Flask-Admin is to help you manage your data. For this, it needs some database backend in order to be able to access that data in the first place. At present, there are five different backends for you to choose from, depending on which database you would like to use for your application.

• SQLAlchemy backend
  • Getting Started
  • Creating simple model
  • Customizing administrative interface
  • Multiple Primary Keys
  • Example
• GeoAlchemy backend
  • Getting Started
  • Creating simple model
  • Limitations
• MongoEngine backend
• Peewee backend
• PyMongo backend

If you don’t know where to start, but you’re familiar with relational databases, then you should probably look at using SQLAlchemy. It is a full-featured toolkit, with support for SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and MS-SQL amongst others. It really comes into its own once you have lots of data, and a fair amount of relations between your data models. If you want to track spatial data like latitude/longitude points, you should look into GeoAlchemy, as well.

If you’re looking for something simpler, or your data models are reasonably self-contained, then MongoEngine could be a better option. It is a python wrapper around the popular NoSQL database called MongoDB.

Of course, if you feel that there’s an awesome database wrapper that is missing from the list above, we’d greatly appreciate it if you could write the plugin for it and submit it as a pull request. A special section of these docs are dedicated to helping you through this process. See Adding a new model backend.