How can I persist a single value in Django?

Question

My Django application retrieves an RSS feed every day. I would like to persist the time the feed was last updated somewhere in the app. I'm only retrieving one feed, it will never grow to be multiple feeds. How can I persist the last updated time?

My ideas so far

1. Create a model and add a datetime field to it. This seems like overkill as it adds another table to the database, in which there will only ever be one row. Other than that, it's the most obvious and straight-forward solution.

2. Create a settings object which just stores key/value mappings. The last updated date would just be row in this database. This is essentially a generic version of the previous solution.

3. Use dbsettings/django-values, which allows you to store settings in the database. The last updated date would just be a 'setting'.

Any other ideas that I'm missing?

Answer 1

In spite of the fact databases regularly store many rows in any given table, having a table with only one row is not especially costly, so long as you don't have (m)any indexes, which would waste space. In fact most databases create many single row tables to implement some features, like monotonic sequences used for generating primary keys. I encourage you to create a regular model for this.