Essential SQLAlchemy, 2nd Edition

Preface

We are surrounded by data everywhere, and your ability to store, update, and report on that data is critical to every application you build. Whether you are developing for the Web, the desktop, or other applications, you need fast and secure access to data. Relational databases are still one of the most common places to put that data.

SQL is a powerful language for querying and manipulating data in a database, but sometimes it’s tough to integrate it with the rest of your application. You may have used string manipulation to generate queries to run over an ODBC interface, or used a DB API as a Python programmer. While those can be effective ways to handle data, they can make security and database changes very difficult.

This book is about a very powerful and flexible Python library named SQLAlchemy that bridges the gap between relational databases and traditional programming. While SQLAlchemy allows you to “drop down” into raw SQL to execute your queries, it encourages higher-level thinking through a more “Pythonic” and friendly approach to database queries and updates. It supplies the tools that let you map your application’s classes and objects to database tables once and then to “forget about it,” or to return to your model again and again to fine-tune performance.

SQLAlchemy is powerful and flexible, but it can also be a little daunting. SQLAlchemy tutorials expose only a fraction of what’s available in this excellent library, and though the online documentation is ...