Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Persistence and Databases

Python supports a variety of ways of making data persistent. One such way, known as serialization, involves viewing the data as a collection of Python objects. These objects can be saved, or serialized, to a byte stream, and later loaded and recreated, or deserialized, back from the byte stream. Object persistence is layered on top of serialization and adds such features as object naming. This chapter covers the built-in Python modules that support serialization and object persistence.

Another way to make data persistent is to store it in a database. One simple type of database is just a file format that uses keyed access to enable selective reading and updating of relevant parts of the data. This chapter covers Python standard library modules that support several variations of this file format, known as DBM.

A relational database management system (RDBMS), such as MySQL or Oracle, provides a more powerful approach to storing, searching, and retrieving persistent data. Relational databases rely on dialects of Structured Query Language (SQL) to create and alter a database’s schema, insert and update data in the database, and query the database according to search criteria. (This chapter does not provide reference material on SQL. For that purpose, I recommend SQL in a Nutshell, by Kevin Kline [O’Reilly].) Unfortunately, despite the existence of SQL standards, no two RDBMSes implement exactly the same SQL dialect.

The Python standard library does ...