Data Modeling in Flask

This chapter covers one of the most important aspects of any application, which is the interaction with the database systems. In this chapter, you will see how Flask can connect to database systems, define models, and query the databases for the retrieval and feeding of data. Flask has been designed to be flexible enough to support any database. The simplest way would be to use the direct SQLite3 package, which is a DB-API 2.0 interface and does not give an actual object-relational mapping (ORM). Here, we need to write SQL queries to talk with the database. This approach is not recommended for large projects, as it can eventually become a nightmare to maintain the application. Also, with this approach, the models are virtually non-existent and everything happens in the view functions, and it is not a good practice to write database queries in your view functions.

In this chapter, we will talk about creating an ORM layer for our Flask applications with SQLAlchemy...