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TL;DR

  • If you have to work on MySQL with version lower than 5.6, you can change DATETIME(6), which is default when using DateTimeField() in Django ORM, into DATETIME, with the following two lines: 
    from django.db.backends.mysql.base import DatabaseWrapper
DatabaseWrapper.data_types['DateTimeField'] = 'datetime
  • Drawback: not able to record datetime to milliseconds.

The Way I Solve the Problem

So here’s the plot, I was dedicating myself on a Django 3.x project recently. The database of this project is MySQL 5.1 due to historical reason. Every time when I tried to run migration, I always receive the following error on Django built-in tables:

pymysql.err.ProgrammingError: (1064, "You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '(6) NOT NULL) ' at line 1")

Therefore, I read the Django document about supporting database, and I got a frustrating message [1]:

Django supports MySQL 5.6 and higher.

However, when I started to work on the project today, I came across an idea: “(6) NOT NULL seems like a type using in SQL. So what type is it actually?” I then used sqlmigrate command to check what happened when running migrations of Django built-in tables under-the-hood. Surprisingly, the (6) NOT NULL which caused error is actually DATETIME(6) NOT NULL.

After searching on stackoverflow, I found a thread discussing about this [2], and more interesting part is that you can patch DATETIME(6) to DATETIME by this in your settings.py:

from django.db.backends.mysql.base import DatabaseWrapper
DatabaseWrapper.data_types['DateTimeField'] = 'datetime

The main drawback is that you cannot record your datetime to milliseconds. Yet, I am delighted because I don’t need to upgrade the database. Moreover, I don’t need to record my datetime into such precision.

Reference

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/databases/#mysql-notes

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52730817/django-migrate-error-mysql-exceptions-programmingerror-1064-you-have-an-err