Data Manipulation

Abstract

You will not get far in development before you realize the need to store information that you are generating or collecting. Modern software applications typically store, or persist, their data somewhere for modification or retrieval later. There are a variety of ways to handle this task; databases, XML files, comma-separated value files, and flat text files are just some of the viable options, depending on the requirements of the application or organization. In this chapter we’ll look at some of the various ways to store and retrieve data, beginning with one of the most common methods, the database. After covering a bit about each underlying data storage method, we’ll look at how IronPython allows us to communicate with it to get our jobs done more easily.