Cape Town, South Africa
Introduction to SQLAlchemy
David Fraser
I started programming when I was 6, on a ZX Spectrum. To avoid making this unneccessarily long, I'll skip to finding Python in 2001. Since then I've moved increasingly into the free software world.
I've worked for St James Software since 1999 (whilst doing CompSci Honours) -- leading development for most of the time, and now managing the development company in Cape Town.
I'm also very interested in linguistics, and have been involved in localization software, as well as a speech visualization project. I play the keyboard, guitar and clarinet (but not all at the same time), and am married and the father of two children (one of whom just started learning Python).
Talk Outline
I will cover how to use SQLAlchemy, primarily as an ORM layer, but also explaining the other parts. This is intended as a hands-on session for people who aren't familiar with SQLAlchemy or are fairly new to Python.
- Introduction -- relational databases, Python DBAPI, ORM layers
- Philosophy of SQLAlchemy -- abstraction, database independence, but hand-coded
- SQLAlchemy core -- engines and connections, data types, schema definition, SQL expressions
- ORM tutorial -- using declarative (will actually work through the standard tutorial from the documentation)
- Sessions and concurrency -- some tips