Unit 6: Databases, Persistence, Redis, and APIs

In this unit, we will first learn about databases and persistence, and then focus on Redis, a popular in-memory data structure store frequently used as a database and cache. We will learn how to implement a Redis database to store our data sets such that they persist beyond the lifetime of our application containers and how to query our data from within a Python script. In the second part of the unit, we will learn about Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and how to use them to access data and services from the web. We will learn how to use the requests library to make HTTP requests to APIs and how to parse the responses to extract useful information.

• Introduction to Databases and Persistence
• Introduction to APIs
• iNaturalist, RCSB PDB, and NCBI