SQLAlchemy support of Postgres Schemas

If you want to do this at the connection string level then use the following:

dbschema='schema1,schema2,public' # Searches left-to-right
engine = create_engine(
    'postgresql+psycopg2://dbuser@dbhost:5432/dbname',
    connect_args={'options': '-csearch_path={}'.format(dbschema)})

But, a better solution for a multi-client (multi-tenant) application is to configure a different db user for each client, and configure the relevant search_path for each user:

alter role user1 set search_path = "$user", public

well there's a few ways to go at this and it depends on how your app is structured. Here is the most basic way:

meta = MetaData(schema="client1")

If the way your app runs is one "client" at a time within the whole application, you're done.

But what may be wrong with that here is, every Table from that MetaData is on that schema. If you want one application to support multiple clients simultaneously (usually what "multitenant" means), this would be unwieldy since you'd need to create a copy of the MetaData and dupe out all the mappings for each client. This approach can be done, if you really want to, the way it works is you'd access each client with a particular mapped class like:

client1_foo = Client1Foo()

and in that case you'd be working with the "entity name" recipe at http://www.sqlalchemy.org/trac/wiki/UsageRecipes/EntityName in conjunction with sometable.tometadata() (see http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/metadata.html#sqlalchemy.schema.Table.tometadata).

So let's say the way it really works is multiple clients within the app, but only one at a time per thread. Well actually, the easiest way to do that in Postgresql would be to set the search path when you start working with a connection:

# start request

# new session
sess = Session()

# set the search path
sess.execute("SET search_path TO client1")

# do stuff with session

# close it.  if you're using connection pooling, the
# search path is still set up there, so you might want to 
# revert it first
sess.close()

The final approach would be to override the compiler using the @compiles extension to stick the "schema" name in within statements. This is doable, but would be tricky as there's not a consistent hook for everywhere "Table" is generated. Your best bet is probably setting the search path on each request.