OODB vs RDBMS

[Dan Lenski]

I'll second the recommendation of sqlalchemy... I've heard it's very
good.  Personally I prefer SQLObject, which is a similar library but in
my opinion a bit simpler and more "pythonic".

Needing to make a special "join table" to do arrays is one of the
downsides of RDBMS, but it leads to big performance advantages over
kludged-in things like using a variable-length string to store arrays.
Plus, with an ORM like sqlalchemy/sqlobject, you never have to deal
with the join table directly.  If you have a table that matches users
to purchases, for example, you can just do something like:

user = Users.retrieve(id)
purchases = user.Purchases()

ORMs like sqlobject are just awesome for making objects in a database
integrate seemlessly with python code: they make accessing and
manipulating objects in the database as easy as accessing regular
program variables.

Dan