Orion picks up sqlalchemy.py and crashes - any idea why?

[sdittmar]

Yesterday I found an interesting code snipped on your site and placed that code unedited as sqlalchemy.py into the PREFECT_HOME directory intending to edit and try something later. Interestingly, this morning my first scheduled run crashed because Orion (2.0b7) has picked up that file and processed it. Why is that?

This is the code from your site:

from prefect import flow

from prefect_sqlalchemy import DatabaseCredentials, AsyncDriver
from prefect_sqlalchemy.database import sqlalchemy_execute


@flow
def sqlalchemy_execute_flow():
    sqlalchemy_credentials = DatabaseCredentials(
        driver=AsyncDriver.POSTGRESQL_ASYNCPG,
        username="prefect",
        password="prefect_password",
        database="postgres",
    )
    sqlalchemy_execute(
        "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS customers (name varchar, address varchar);",
        sqlalchemy_credentials,
    )
    sqlalchemy_execute(
        "INSERT INTO customers (name, address) VALUES (:name, :address);",
        sqlalchemy_credentials,
        params={"name": "Marvin", "address": "Highway 42"}
    )

sqlalchemy_execute_flow()

This is the circular import error message I received (happy to provide more lines if needed):

  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 850, in exec_module
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 228, in _call_with_frames_removed
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/prefect/__init__.py", line 21, in <module>
    from .orion.schemas.states import State
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/prefect/orion/schemas/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from . import states, schedules, data, core, sorting, filters, responses, actions
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/prefect/orion/schemas/sorting.py", line 7, in <module>
    from sqlalchemy.sql.expression import ColumnElement
  File "/home/xxxxxx/./sqlalchemy.py", line 1, in <module>
    from prefect import flow
ImportError: cannot import name 'flow' from partially initialized module 'prefect' (most likely due to a circular import) (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/prefect/__init__.py)
Orion stopped!

After I renamed the file to sqlalchemy.txt everything worked fine again...

[sdittmar]

I suppose, because one of my flows imports sqlalchemy and PREFECT_HOME is in the search path and that is why that file with the same name gets picked up... ok, ok...

[zanieb]

Hm, I don't see where this creates the sqlalchemy.py file? Did you place PREFECT_HOME on your python path? cc @ahuang11