There does seem to be a natural conflict between large data with hierarchical structure and the generally flat lists and dictionaries of Python, that quickly le

There does seem to be a natural conflict between large data with hierarchical structure and the generally flat lists and dictionaries of Python, that quickly leads to poor performance. It usually only takes a few foreign keys to create an exponential number of queries. But I have no idea if there are database interfaces that make this problem simplistic. In my experience with Django, anything but the most simplistic page will be so noticeable slow that one has to go through the queries and use things like select related. Occasionally it is also better to just grab everything into memory and do operations in Python, rather than force the data manipulation to be done as a single database query. It is a good tool for its purpose, but it is no replacement for SQL knowledge when working with complex relational databases.