Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Chapter 12. Data Persistence

Data persistence, in a simple, generic sense, is saving data for later use. This implies that the data, once saved for later, will survive if the process that saved it terminates. This is typically accomplished by converting the data to some format and then writing that data to disk. Sometimes, the format is human readable, such as XML or YAML. Other times, the format is not usable directly by humans, such as a Berkeley DB file (bdb) or a SQLite database.

What kind of data might you need to save for later? Perhaps you have a script that keeps track of the last modified date of the files in a directory and you need to run it occasionally to see which files have changed since the last time you ran it. The data about the files is something you want to save for later, where later is the next time you run the script. You could store this data in some kind of persistent data file. In another scenario, you have one machine that has potential network issues and you decide to run a script every 15 minutes to see how quickly it pings a number of other machines on the network. You could store the ping times in a persistent data file for later use. Later in this case has more to do with when you plan on examining the data, rather than when the program that gathered the data needs access to it.

We will be breaking this discussion of serialization into two categories: simple and relational.

Simple Serialization

There are a number of ways of storing data to disk for ...