While creating, updating, and deleting are fairly straightforward operations, the real fun starts when we look at ways to retrieve our entries. We'll start with the basics, and then work our way up to more interesting queries.

We will use a special attribute on our model class to make queries: Entry.query. This attribute exposes a variety of APIs for working with the collection of entries in the database.

Let's simply retrieve a list of all the entries in the Entry table:

In []: entries = Entry.query.all()
In []: entries  # What are our entries?
Out[]: [<Entry u'First entry'>, <Entry u'Second entry'>, <Entry u'Third entry'>, <Entry u'Fourth entry'>]

As you can see, in this example the query returns a list of Entry instances that we created. When no explicit ordering is specified, the entries are returned to us in an arbitrary order chosen by the database. Let's specify that we want the entries returned to us in an alphabetical order by title...