title: Read a local file in django
body: <p>I'm quite stuck on this one! 
  I am writing a Django view that reads data from an external database. To do this, I am using the standard MySQLdb library.
  Now, to load the data, I must do a very long and complex query. I can hard code that query in my view and that works just fine.
  But I think that is not practical; I want to be able to change the query in the future, so I try to load the statement from a text file. 
  My problem is that I don't know where to store and how to open that file. Wherever I do, I get a "No such file or directory" error. Even saving it in the same directory than the code of the view fails.</p>
  
  <p>Note that this is not an uploaded file; it's just an external file that completes my code.
  Any ideas?
  Thanks in advance!</p>