ABSTRACT
The amount of data that is handled in a typical bioinformatics project forces us to use something more versatile than the data structures bundled with Python. Lists, tuples, and dictionaries are very flexible, but they are not suitable to model all the complexity associated with real world data. Sometimes it is necessary to have a permanent data repository (in computer terms this is called data persistence), since data structures are available only while the program is running. While it is possible to write out the data to a file using pickle, this is not as efficient as using a database engine designed for that purpose.
