One solution that I have employed is to do this:
1) Create a custom management command, e.g.
python manage.py my_cool_command
2) Use cron (on Linux) or at (on Windows) to run my command at the required times.
This is a simple solution that doesn't require installing a heavy AMQP stack. However there are nice advantages to using something like Celery, mentioned in the other answers. In particular, with Celery it is nice to not have to spread your application logic out into crontab files. However the cron solution works quite nicely for a small to medium sized application and where you don't want a lot of external dependencies.
EDIT:
In later version of windows the at command is deprecated for Windows 8, Server 2012 and above. You can use schtasks.exe for same use.
**** UPDATE ****
This the new link of django doc for writing the custom management command
If you mean to do aggregation you can use the aggregation features of the ORM:
from django.db.models import Count
result = (Members.objects
.values('designation')
.annotate(dcount=Count('designation'))
.order_by()
)
This results in a query similar to
SELECT designation, COUNT(designation) AS dcount
FROM members GROUP BY designation
and the output would be of the form
[{'designation': 'Salesman', 'dcount': 2},
{'designation': 'Manager', 'dcount': 2}]
If you don't include the order_by(), you may get incorrect results if the default sorting is not what you expect.
If you want to include multiple fields in the results, just add them as arguments to values, for example:
.values('designation', 'first_name', 'last_name')
References:
Best Solution
Pretty amazing that no one has suggested pdb. Place the following in a strategic point in your code:
When execution reaches that point, the dev server will drop into a shell where you can check values of variables, trace the execution, etc.
It works like a standard shell (use any python commands you like), but there's also special commands that let you control the execution. For example
nextwill go to the next line (processing the previous line).continuewill continue execution until the next break point, etc. (full list of pdb commands)