Lightweight access with sqlite3

SQLite is a very popular relational database. It's very lightweight and used by many applications, for instance, web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox. The sqlite3 module in the standard Python distribution can be used to work with a SQLite database. With sqlite3, we can either store the database in a file or keep it in RAM. For this example, we will do the latter. Import sqlite3 as follows:

import sqlite3

A connection to the database is needed to proceed. If we wanted to store the database in a file, we would provide a filename. Instead, do the following:

with sqlite3.connect(":memory:") as con:

The with statement is standard Python and relies on the presence of a __exit__() method in a special context manager class. With this statement, we don't need to explicitly close the connection. The closing of the connection is done automatically by the context manager. After connecting to a database, we need a cursor. That's generally how it works with databases by the...