<p>To communicate with our database, we'll be using the <a href="http://www.sqlalchemy.org/">sqlalchemy</a> Python library. Sqlalchemy is a comprehensive toolkit for working with databases within Python. It has two main components: its Core and its Object Relational Mapper (ORM). If you've ever written a Flask application, you will be familiar with the ORM but, for this tutorial, we'll be using the Core component to issue SQL commands directly to our sqlite database.</p>

<p>Sqlalchemy uses an 'engine' object to interact with the database which you can create using a 'database url' string. The <a href="http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/engines.html#database-urls">sqlalchemy documentation</a> has details on the different types of url you need to use for various DBMSs.</p>

<p>SQLite uses a single file for each database and the url is essentially a path to that file. Our example database will contain data about High Altitude Balloon flights. Let's create an engine and call our database file 'flights.db:'</p>

<p>Now, we'll connect to our database using a 'connection' object. At this point, sqlalchemy will connect to a database if it already exists and, if not, it will create the database file and connect to it.</p>