On Feb 26, 9:29 am, Chris Rebert <c...@rebertia.com> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Jeremy <jlcon...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have lots of data that I currently store in dictionaries. However, > > the memory requirements are becoming a problem. I am considering > > using a database of some sorts instead, but I have never used them > > before. Would a database be more memory efficient than a dictionary? > > I also need platform independence without having to install a database > > and Python interface on all the platforms I'll be using. Is there > > something built-in to Python that will allow me to do this? > > If you won't be using the SQL features of the database, `shelve` might > be another option; from what I can grok, I sounds like a dictionary > stored mostly on disk rather than entirely in RAM (not 100% sure > though):http://docs.python.org/library/shelve.html > > It's in the std lib and supports several native dbm libraries for its > backend; one of them should almost always be present. > > Cheers, > Chris > --http://blog.rebertia.com
Shelve looks like an interesting option, but what might pose an issue is that I'm reading the data from a disk instead of memory. I didn't mention this in my original post, but I was hoping that by using a database it would be more memory efficient in storing data in RAM so I wouldn't have to read from (or swap to/from) disk. Would using the shelve package make reading/writing data from disk faster since it is in a binary format? Jeremy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
