Database Support

Abstract

Using simple, plain-text files can get you only so far. Yes, they can get you very far, but at some point, you may need some extra functionality. You may want some automated serialization, and you can turn to shelve (see Chapter 10) and pickle (a close relative of shelve). But you may want features that go beyond even this. For example, you might want to have automated support for concurrent access to your data; that is, to allow several users to read from and write to your disk-based data without causing any corrupted files or the like. Or you may want to be able to perform complex searches using many data fields or properties at the same time, rather than the simple single-key lookup of shelve. There are plenty of solutions to choose from, but if you want this to scale to large amounts of data and you want the solution to be easily understandable by other programmers, choosing a relatively standard form of database is probably a good idea.