Lesson Overview

Here are the three core topics we'll be covering in this lesson:

1. Interacting with a (remote) database

Backend developers need to interact with databases on a regular basis in order to manipulate and maintain the models behind their web applications. In this lesson, we'll build a foundational understanding of how those interactions work.

This foundational understanding will be essential in later lessons when we get into more advanced concepts related to database interactions.

In working with a database, we'll need to use a Database Management System (DBMS) .

A Database Management System (DBMS) is simply software that allows you to interact with a database (e.g., to access or modify the data in that database).

There are many different Database Management Systems out there, but the particular DBMS we'll be using is called PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres ).

2. Database Application Programming Interfaces (DBAPIs)

Once we've looked at the basics of interacting with a database, we'll need to understand how to interface with that database from another language or web server framework (such as Python, NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, etc.). This is where DBAPIs come in.

In this lesson, we'll go over the basics of DBAPIs , and how they are used to interact with a database from another language (like Python).

3. psycopg2

Finally, we'll get some experience working with the widely used psycopg2 library, which will allow us to interact with a database from Python.

psycopg2 is a database adapter that allows us to interact with a Postgres database from Python.