Before we get to the actual coding!

In almost every  interactive, data-driven (store and retrieve information from a database) web application there are four basic operations that run at the back-end of the application. Create, Read, Update, Delete. Each time we make a new profile or post a new status we are creating data. Whenever we look at a friend's latest tweet or say skimming through a blog we are reading data. When we change the items in the shopping cart or update our profile we are using the update operation and when we remove an old picture from our profile we are deleting data from the database. In the posts following, we will create our database using SQL(Structured Query Language) and to make our life easier we will not be writing actual query statements. Instead, we will be using an Object Relational Mapper(ORM) that will do all the dirty work for us. ORM's can be thought of as translators that will convert our python code to sql queries.

We will be using SQLAlchemy as our ORM tool. Okay! Time to do some CRUD.