Fields

The YDB backend supports most built-in Django fields. The table below is both the support status and the exact YDB type mapping for each field.

Legend: ✅ supported · 🟡 works with caveats (see the note) · ❌ unsupported or not enforced by YDB.

Field		YDB type	Python	Notes
AutoField / SmallAutoField / BigAutoField	✅	Serial family (Int32 / Int16 / Int64)	int	Value generated by YDB.
CharField, TextField, SlugField, EmailField	✅	Utf8	str
IPAddressField, GenericIPAddressField	✅	Utf8	str
BinaryField, FileField	✅	String	bytes
FilePathField	✅	Utf8	str
BooleanField	✅	Bool	bool
SmallIntegerField / IntegerField / BigIntegerField	✅	Int16 / Int32 / Int64	int	Signed integer chosen by range.
PositiveSmallIntegerField / PositiveIntegerField / PositiveBigIntegerField	✅	UInt16 / UInt32 / UInt64	int	Unsigned integer chosen by range.
FloatField	✅	Float	float	Cannot be a primary key.
DecimalField	✅	Decimal	Decimal	Arbitrary max_digits / decimal_places; values rounded to the field’s scale (YDB keeps ~26 significant digits).
UUIDField	✅	UUID	uuid.UUID	Native UUID.
DurationField	✅	Interval	int	±136 years; cannot be a primary key. Temporal subtraction supported.
DateField	✅	Date32	datetime.date	Signed wide date — dates before 1970 are supported.
DateTimeField	🟡	Timestamp64	datetime.datetime	Microsecond precision, instants before 1970. Under USE_TZ=False naive datetimes shift by the server timezone on round-trip; the production default USE_TZ=True is unaffected.
TimeField	🟡	Int64	datetime.time	No native time type — stored as microseconds since midnight, introspected back as BigIntegerField. __hour / __minute / __second lookups work.
JSONField	🟡	Json	dict / list / str / int / float / bool	Equality filtering (filter(data=value)) is not supported by YDB and the column cannot be introspected. null=True works, and __isnull filtering works.

Relationship fields

ForeignKey, OneToOneField, and ManyToManyField work through the Django ORM. A relation is stored as a plain scalar <name>_id column typed from the target’s primary key (ManyToManyField uses an ordinary through table); you define relations, query them, and traverse them with select_related (and prefetch_related, with a few edge cases) as usual.

What YDB does not do is enforce any of the relational guarantees at the database level:

• no FOREIGN KEY / REFERENCES / ON DELETE is emitted or introspected;

• there is no cascade delete at the database level — Django’s ORM on_delete still runs for ORM deletes, but raw SQL or external writers can orphan rows;

• one-to-one and many-to-many-pair uniqueness is not enforced — the ORM declaration is accepted, but duplicates are not rejected.

Enforce these in application code (validate_unique(), clean(), validators) where you need them. For example:

class Product(models.Model):
    sku = models.CharField(max_length=20, primary_key=True)


class ProductReview(models.Model):
    product = models.ForeignKey(Product, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    rating = models.IntegerField()

ProductReview.product is stored as a product_id column with the same YDB type as Product.sku. An insert writes the referenced key value only:

ProductReview.objects.create(product_id="SKU-1", rating=5)

YDB accepts this row even if no Product(sku="SKU-1") exists.