Databases with database/sql

Part of the Go course

Every program you have written so far forgets everything the moment it exits. That is fine for a tool that transforms its input and stops, and useless for anything that has users, orders, sessions or history. Sooner or later a Go program needs to put data somewhere that survives it, and for most programs that somewhere is a relational database.

Go's approach to this is unusual and worth understanding before you write a line of it. The standard library ships a package called database/sql that knows nothing whatsoever about PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite. It defines the shape of the conversation: how you open a connection, how you send a statement, how you read rows back. The knowledge of any particular database lives in a separate package called a driver.