Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Advantages and drawbacks

One of the more significant advantages of a relational database data store is its ability to retrieve related records in a single query request—the user/orders structure mentioned earlier, for example. Most relational databases systems will also allow multiple queries to be made in a single request, and will return a collection of records for each of those queries as a single result set. The same user- and orders-table structure could, for example, be queried to return a single user and all of that user's orders, which has some advantages in application object structures where one object type has one or more collections of objects associated with them.

Another potentially significant advantage to most relational database ...