generally precludes using pickled objects directly as cross-process shared statepickling works on almost any python datatype--numberslistsdictionariesclass instancesnested structuresand more--and so is general way to store data because pickles contain native python objectsthere is almost no database api to be foundthe objects stored with pickling are processed with normal python syntax when they are later retrieved using object pickling pickling may sound complicated the first time you encounter itbut the good news is that python hides all the complexity of object-to-string conversion in factthe pickle module ' interfaces are incredibly simple to use for exampleto pickle an object into serialized stringwe can either make pickler and call its methods or use convenience functions in the module to achieve the same effectp pickle pickler(filemake new pickler for pickling to an open output file object file dump(object write an object onto the pickler' file/stream pickle dump(objectfilesame as the last two calls combinedpickle an object onto an open file string pickle dumps(objectreturn the pickled representation of object as character string unpickling from serialized string back to the original object is similar--both object and convenience function interfaces are availableu pickle unpickler(filemake an unpickler for unpickling from an open input file object file object load(read an object from the unpickler' file/stream object pickle load(filesame as the last two calls combinedunpickle an object from an open file object pickle loads(stringread an object from character string rather than file pickler and unpickler are exported classes in all of the preceding casesfile is either an open file object or any object that implements the same attributes as file objectspickler calls the file' write method with string argument unpickler calls the file' read method with byte countand readline without arguments databases and persistence