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Meet Peewee, Our ORM
1:46So, what is an ORM and why would you want to use one? Let's talk about that and get our chosen one, Peewee, installed.
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Once upon a time,
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if you needed to interact with a database,
you had to write SQL, Sequel, or
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Structured Query Language, which is the
language that most common databases speak.
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SQL is amazingly powerful, but for day to
day tasks, it can be pretty daunting, and
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it's definitely a great way to shoot
yourself squarely in the foot.
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Since most of us like not shooting
ourselves in the feet,
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we have great software projects known as
ORMs.
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It's an acronym that stands for Object
Relational Mapping.
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Sadly, the words don't make it make sense
right away.
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It's a piece of software that turns
objects in your code,
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into rows in your database, and vice
versa.
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They do this by defining a model, that
represents a table in our database.
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Models, which will be classes, have
attributes,
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which become the columns in the table.
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Every time we call save on a new instance
of our class, we add a row to the table.
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We're going to be using a lightweight ORM
for Python named Peewee.
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That was created by Charles Leifer in 2010.
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It just so happens too,
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that a lot of this course is inspired by a
tutorial written by Charles Leifer.
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Obviously I own a lot of things.
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Thanks Charles.
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Peewee is already installed in workspaces,
but if you're working along on
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your own computer, you'll want to install
it yourself.
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You'll do that with pip install peewee.
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As for the database we'll be connecting
to,
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we're going to use SQL Lite on Workspaces.
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It's a great database for development,
because it's lightweight and
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starting over is as easy as deleting a
file.
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If you already have Postgres, or
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MySQL database servers set up and want to
use them, feel free.
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I'll link to the Peewee docs, for
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how to connect to those databases in the
teacher's notes.
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If you're completely freaked out by
databases,
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be sure to check out our databases course,
which I'll also link to in the notes.
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If you're still with me, let's go see how
to start with Peewee, and
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the wide world of databases with Python.
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