Beginning Python®: Using Python 2.6 and Python 3.1

Chapter 14. Accessing Databases

Just about every large enterprise system uses a database for storing data. For example, Amazon.com, the online retailer, needs a database to store information on each product for sale. For Python to prove capable of handling these types of enterprise applications, the language must be able to access databases.

Luckily, Python provides a database API (Application Programming Interface — how you program for the database), which is a generic API that enables you to access most databases, in spite of the databases' different native APIs. The database, or DB, API doesn't define all aspects of working with databases, so some minor differences exist. For the most part, though, you can access databases such as Oracle or MySQL from your Python scripts without worrying too much about the details of the specific databases.

Having a generic database API is very useful because you may need to switch databases or have your application work with multiple databases, and you won't want to recode major parts of your program to allow this. Normally, you can do all of this in Python without a lot of programming changes.

Even if you aren't writing the next amazon.com online site, databases provide a convenient means to persist data for longer than the program is running (so that you don't lose the data that a user has entered if you want to restart your program), query for items, and modify your data in a safe manner.

This chapter covers the two main database systems supported ...