How to make work Django Window expression with SQLite? - sql

Question

I am testing Django ORM 'Window' SQL-wrapper capabilities.
I have following query in my code:
queryset = TripInterval.objects.annotate(
num=Window(RowNumber(), order_by=F('id').asc())
).values('id', 'num')
which results in the following SQL query string (from debugger):
SELECT "request_tripinterval"."id",
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY "request_tripinterval"."id" ASC) AS "num"
FROM "request_tripinterval"
and is pretty straightforward. It WORKS when I copy/paste it into third party db-client. But Django ORM gives me an error:
OperationalError
near "(": syntax error
What is wrong here?
System: Windows 10
RDBMS: SQLite
Django: 2.2.4
Python: 3.6.0

Answer 1

Sounds like your Python is using an outdated version of SQLite.
SQLite added support for window functions in version 3.25, released in August 2018. Prior to that version, the exact same syntax error you're seeing would be thrown when trying to use window functions.
You can check the SQLite version used by Python by running this in the interpreter:
import sqlite3
sqlite3.sqlite_version
If the version that is output is older that 3.25, you'll need to upgrade your SQLite library version.
On a Windows system, the easiest way to do that is by installing the sqlite package from Anaconda. Otherwise, the general approach is to upgrade your installed system SQLite libraries, then recompile/reinstall Python. Alternatively, you could try installing the pysqlite package from PyPi.