Introduction

For a long time I wanted to document something I have done many times in production systems but never explained clearly: using Django ORM as a standalone module to connect to an existing database.

In my work I have often dealt with legacy systems where the only reliable source of truth was the database itself. In those situations, Django ORM became my Swiss army knife. With just a few lines of configuration I could connect to an existing database, introspect its schema using inspectdb, and start querying data from the shell through an API I already knew.

Recently I realized I had finally found a simple and reproducible way to demonstrate this approach step by step, so that anyone can try it locally and understand how Django ORM can operate independently from a full Django project.