Im trying to render a django template from a database outside of djangos normal request-response structure. But it appears to be non-trivial due to the way django templates
There's nothing complicated about this, and it doesn't have anything to do with the request/response structure. All you need to do is pass the template string into the django.template.Template
constructor (BTW, I've changed the name of your model, to avoid confusion):
from django.template import Context, Template
from myapp.models import DbTemplate
s = DbTemplate.objects.get(pk=123).content
tpl = Template(s)
tpl.render(Context(dict(a=123, b=456)))
There is a reusable app which loads templates from the database:
http://django-dbtemplates.readthedocs.org/en/latest/