> > SQL databases like MySQL are _designed_ for efficiency. Efficiency with respect to what? That statement is plain wrong. They are designed for a pretty general case of data storage efficiency, in the domain of relational algebra. And for a lot of use-cases, they offer a good ratio of ease-of-use, speed and reliability and the overhead they introduce.
But there are lots of cases where hand-tailored data structures - in python as well as in C - are way better suited. Think of graph representations for example, especially for reachability queries and the like. Does google use ORACLE (or whatever DB) for their index? Nope. So - without knowing the usecase, """ All right, sorry, looks like they want to load the entire table into RAM and key it off the first field. Kind of defeats the point of having SQL, but there you go... """ is a pretty strong thing to say. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
