Mastering Object-oriented Python

Chapter 10. Storing and Retrieving Objects via Shelve

There are many applications where we need to persist objects individually. The techniques we looked at in Chapter 9, Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML, were biased towards handling a single object. Sometimes, we need to persist separate, individual objects from a larger domain.

Applications with persistent objects may demonstrate four use cases, summarized as the CRUD Operations: Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete. In the general case, any of these operations may be applied to any object in the domain; this leads to the need for a more sophisticated persistence mechanism than a monolithic load or dump to a file. In addition to squandering memory, simple loads and dumps ...