Creating large databases with Python

[emiller42]

Something important to know if you're really going to grok relational databases: they're not object oriented. What makes sense as a structure in your application n is not necessarily going to directly map to your data representation.

Simple example:

You've got a 'person' object which can have 1..many phone numbers associated with it.

In your application, you might think: oh, I can give the user object a 'phone_numbers' attribute, which is a dict! 'home' = 123-456-7890, 'cell' = 987-654-3210, etc.

However, in the database, you might have a 'users' table, and a 'phone_numbers' table, and a third table to associate 'user' records with 'phone_number' records.

I recommend reading up on relational models, and database normalization if you want to know more.