Front Matter¶
Purpose of this Document¶
Students attending the Introduction to SQLAlchemy tutorial should receive a copy of this document prior to attending the class, and hopefully will be able to download the entire student handout package.
At the very least, students should read through the Relational Database Review section of this document, which introduces/reviews basic relational database and transactional concepts; this section is essentially prerequisite material to the tutorial itself. As many/most students will be familiar with a large portion of this material, making it available ahead of time will hopefully allow those who are less familiar to catch up, while not spending too much time in the class itself with what may be review material for many.
A second task that would be extremely helpful would be for students to install and test the slide runner environment and application; the Package Setup section describes these steps in detail, and includes getting students familiar with Python virtual environments if not already, getting the latest version of SQLAlchemy installed into the local (non-system-wide) environment, and ensuring that the tutorial slides can be run successfully. In the actual class, we’ll spend a lot of time stepping through these slides, and students can step through the same slides locally on their machines as well as attempt other experiments and exercises within the environment.
Two other sections, Glossary and Further Reading, represent more detailed paths for learning. The glossary is broken into two sections: Relational Terms and SQLAlchemy Core / Object Relational Terms. It’s a good idea for students to run through the relational section here; the SQLAlchemy section on the other hand will be more useful after the tutorial is complete, as a place to review some of the key concepts covered in the material.
Web Site¶
Mailing List¶
Send an email to: sqlalchemy-subscribe@googlegroups.com
View archives or subscribe with a Google account at: http://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy
IRC Channel¶
#sqlalchemy on the Freenode network
Presenters / Credits¶
Michael Bayer (http://techspot.zzzeek.org) is a NYC-based software contractor with a decade of experience dealing with relational databases of all shapes and sizes. After writing many homegrown database abstraction layers in such languages as C, Java and Perl, and finally after several years of practice working with a huge multi-server Oracle system for Major League Baseball, he wrote SQLAlchemy as the ‘ultimate toolset’ for generating SQL and dealing with databases overall. The goal is to contribute towards a world-class one-of-a-kind toolset for Python, helping to make Python the universally popular programming platform it deserves to be.
Parts of this handout, as well as the core of the “Slide Presenter” tool, were written by Jason Kirtland (http://discorporate.us/jek/) who has been a key contributor to the SQLAlchemy project for many years.
Big thanks to Ben Trofatter for help editing / proofreading this document.