h4. Working with POMs during development

    SQLModel will know that something declared as `str` will be a SQL column of type `TEXT` (or `VARCHAR`, depending on the database).

### Create an Engine

A SQLModel `engine` (underneath it's actually a SQLAlchemy `engine`) is what **holds the connections** to the database.

///

An environment variable (also known as "**env var**") is a variable that lives **outside** of the Python code, in the **operating system**, and could be read by your Python code (or by other programs as well).

Environment variables could be useful for handling application **settings**, as part of the **installation** of Python, etc.

## Create and Use Env Vars

        return data
    ```

    Note that for OAuth2 the scope `items:read` is a single scope in an opaque string.
    You could have custom internal logic to separate it by colon characters (`:`) or
    similar, and get the two parts `items` and `read`. Many applications do that to
    group and organize permissions, you could do it as well in your application, just
    know that that it is application specific, it's not part of the specification.
    """

```Python hl_lines="1  4"
{!> ../../docs_src/python_types/tutorial008b.py!}
```

////

In both cases this means that `item` could be an `int` or a `str`.

#### Possibly `None`

You can declare that a value could have a type, like `str`, but that it could also be `None`.

In Python 3.6 and above (including Python 3.10) you can declare it by importing and using `Optional` from the `typing` module.

   *   mutation, which is not an actual risk because we use `synchronized`.
   * - Make `remaining` require a non-null `seq` argument. But this is a bit weird because the
   *   method, while it would avoid the instance field `seq` would still access the instance field
   *   `pos`.
   */

  @Override
  public synchronized int read(CharBuffer target) throws IOException {
    checkNotNull(target);
    checkOpen();

   *   mutation, which is not an actual risk because we use `synchronized`.
   * - Make `remaining` require a non-null `seq` argument. But this is a bit weird because the
   *   method, while it would avoid the instance field `seq` would still access the instance field
   *   `pos`.
   */

  @Override
  public synchronized int read(CharBuffer target) throws IOException {
    checkNotNull(target);
    checkOpen();

This was designed this way mainly to allow using the same objects "yielded" by dependencies inside of background tasks, because the exit code would be executed after the background tasks were finished.

Now, let's see how you could use that to return a custom response.

Let's say that you want to return an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML" class="external-link" target="_blank">XML</a> response.

Downloading and installing the package dependencies **could take minutes**, but using the **cache** would **take seconds** at most.

And as you would be building the container image again and again during development to check that your code changes are working, there's a lot of accumulated time this would save.