How to increase a counter in SQLAlchemy

If you have something like:

mytable = Table('mytable', db.metadata,
    Column('id', db.Integer, primary_key=True),
    Column('counter', db.Integer)
)

You can increment fields like this:

m = mytable.query.first()
m.counter = mytable.c.counter + 1

Or, if you have some mapped Models, you can write alternatively:

m = Model.query.first()
m.counter = Model.counter + 1

Both versions will return the sql statement you have asked for. But if you don’t include the column and just write m.counter += 1, then the new value would be calculated in Python (and race conditions are likely to happen). So always include a column as shown in the two examples above in such counter queries.