Python Data Persistence – A Quick Guide

Almost every other computer application, whether it is a web based application, a standalone data logger, a mobile app or a desktop application with or without GUI, stores and retrieves data from some persistent storage device such as hard disk or a flash drive. Such storage device may either be connected to computer or it may be available on a network. Without this ability to recurrently access, update and retrieve stored data, most computer applications would have been reduced to programmable calculators!

Python Data Persistence – A Quick Guide

Data storage format depends on the logical structure of data and on the processing logic. Data may be stored in flat computer files, in tables of relational databases or different store formats of NOSQL databases. You will know more about these terms in subsequent chapters of this Page.

Back-end process of a computer application stores, modifies and retrieves data in response to front-end user’s requirements. Almost every programming language offers tools to interact with files/databases. This book aims to familiarize the reader with Python’s functions and modules that handle persistent data processing.

Python Data Persistence – Getting Started

Python Data Persistence – Program Flow Control

Python Data Persistence – Structured Python

Python Data Persistence Object Oriented Programming OOP

Python Data Persistence – File IO

Python Data Persistence – Object Serialization

Python Data Persistence – RDBMS Concepts

Python Data Persistence – Python DB-API

Python Data Persistence – Python – SQLAlchemy

Python Data Persistence – Python and Excel

Python Data Persistence – Python – PyMongo

Python Data Persistence – Python – Cassandra

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Why Python?

Popularity of Python has increased by many fold recently because of the emergence of powerful libraries for data analysis, visualization and machine learning. These libraries use data stored in different formats such as text files and relational databases. Hence to be a proficient data scientist, it is important to have a sound understanding of Python tools for data persistence.

Features of Python

Python is easy!: So why has Python been so popular? First and foremost, Python is very easy to learn and use. “Simple is better than Complex”. This is one of the guiding principles of Python’s design philosophy. It has clean and simple syntax resembling to a natural language. It saves a lot of development time.

Open source: Python is free and open source having a very active and supportive developer community. As a result of plenty of documentation resources, guides tutorials and forums me available in public domain. Any newcomer can access, learn, collaborate and seek advice from community.

Object oriented: Python is completely object oriented, although it supports multiple programming paradigms including functional programming style.

Extensible: Python can be easily integrated with other languages such as C/C++, Java, .NET, etc. Corporate support: Python enjoys great corporate support. Google for example promotes Python in a big way as Python is extensively used in many of its applications. Many other companies use Python as their development platform.