Virtually every application uses data, so it's no surprise that a huge variety of techniques have evolved to store and retrieve it. With all the options, it's easy to overlook what may be the best solution for your application. This talk will briefly describe a wide range of data persistence options, from flat files to object-relational mappers atop RDBMS, help you decide which suits your application's needs, and demonstrate techniques for getting data into and out of them. The syntax and tools described will be specific to the Python language, but the high-level overview of options should be useful to all programmers.

After a misspent youth studying chemical engineering, Catherine Devlin stumbled into Oracle database administration in 1999. She has found it to be a good source of paychecks while she has fun experimenting with data-centered programming, particularly using Python. She works as a contractor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is active in the Oracle and Python user communities. She writes and speaks on database topics, and blogs at http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/