[FrustratedMonky]

Guess to get back to the post. He did it for learning, not to be an exact duplicate or competitor to replace other RDBMS.

Often when learning, you do not implement every difficult edge case, the most complex. You are just trying to get the jist of it. You want a smaller problem to solve.

Maybe as a learning project, it isn't important to have concurrency, networking, memory management. Unless, any of those things happens to be of interest to learn about also, then add them back in.

I don't think this is trying to be an argument for Python as good to build an RDB in. (of course it isn't for all the reasons you list)

Python just happens to be an easy language for beginners, so why not build a basic RDB to learn about that too.

[crabbone]

Because, especially for learning, you need tools adequate for the task... Masters can be more flexible and use inferior tools and still be successful; students need every bit of help they can get, and they need the tools that aren't going to betray them every step of the way.

Giving someone Python to make a database, is like giving a student in a culinary school a dull knife: it's hard to do it with the right tools, but it becomes mission impossible when you are also crippled by your tools.

It's the same analogy I used before: using toy "doctor set" vs. learning to be a surgeon. There's no path that will bring you from using a toy set to be a surgeon. It serves a different purpose: entertainment / roleplay. You don't mean to roleplay as a programmer by using Python, right?

[dkfellows]

You need tools adequate to the task, but the task isn't necessarily what other people think it is. In this case, I'd bet the tasks are to learn what's going on inside a database and become better at programming in Python, not to write a high-performance production-ready database implementation.