I have a local Odoo v8 installed (installed from source, with demo data) and have installed the interactive shell module from:

    https://www.odoo.com/apps/modules/8.0/shell/

Both the local install and the interactive shell module seem to work as they should: I can start the odoo server and use the application through the browser, and I can query the database through the interactive shell. I start both, of course, with the same database argument as such:

./odoo.py -d mmg

and

./odoo.py shell -d mmg

Changes I make through the webinterface are then reflected in the shell environment. If I change, for instance, the administrator's display name, this change is reflected when I later query the model in the shell environment:

>>> self.name
u'New name'

However, creating or updating any records via the interactive shell don't seem to be persisted to the database. Here are the different ways I have tried:

>>> self.name = 'Administrator'

and

>>> u = self.env['res.users'].search([('login', '=', 'admin')])
>>> u.name = 'Administrator'

and from within a function with the @api.one decorator. None of them seem to persist to the database.

What is wrong?

Thanks in advance!