This might all sound abstract. Don't worry. You'll see all this in action in the [Tutorial - User Guide](tutorial/index.md){.internal-link target=_blank}.

The important thing is that by using standard Python types, in a single place (instead of adding more classes, decorators, etc), **FastAPI** will do a lot of the work for you.

!!! info

    return db.query(models.User).filter(models.User.email == email).first()


def get_users(db: Session, skip: int = 0, limit: int = 100):
    return db.query(models.User).offset(skip).limit(limit).all()


def create_user(db: Session, user: schemas.UserCreate):
    fake_hashed_password = user.password + "notreallyhashed"
    db_user = models.User(email=user.email, hashed_password=fake_hashed_password)
    db.add(db_user)

* Create a `metadata` object.
* Create a table `notes` using the `metadata` object.

```Python hl_lines="4  14  16-22"
{!../../../docs_src/async_sql_databases/tutorial001.py!}
```

!!! tip
    Notice that all this code is pure SQLAlchemy Core.

    `databases` is not doing anything here yet.

## Import and set up `databases`

* Import `databases`.
* Create a `DATABASE_URL`.
* Create a `database` object.

* **After** obtaining a secure connection, the communication protocol is **still HTTP**.
    * The contents are **encrypted**, even though they are being sent with the **HTTP protocol**.

* Converting non-JSON request bodies to JSON (e.g. <a href="https://msgpack.org/index.html" class="external-link" target="_blank">`msgpack`</a>).
* Decompressing gzip-compressed request bodies.
* Automatically logging all request bodies.

## Handling custom request body encodings

Let's see how to make use of a custom `Request` subclass to decompress gzip requests.

And an `APIRoute` subclass to use that custom request class.

You will see the automatic API docs for the sub-application, including only its own _path operations_, all under the correct sub-path prefix `/subapi`:

<img src="/img/tutorial/sub-applications/image02.png">

I'll show you some concrete examples in the next chapters.

---

Then the next concepts to consider are all about the program running your actual API (e.g. Uvicorn).

## Program and Process

* **MongoDB**
* **Cassandra**
* **CouchDB**
* **ArangoDB**
* **ElasticSearch**, etc.

!!! tip
    There is an official project generator with **FastAPI** and **Couchbase**, all based on **Docker**, including a frontend and more tools: <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/full-stack-fastapi-couchbase" class="external-link" target="_blank">https://github.com/tiangolo/full-stack-fastapi-couchbase</a>

# Reference - Code API

Here's the reference or code API, the classes, functions, parameters, attributes, and
all the FastAPI parts you can use in your applications.

If you want to **learn FastAPI** you are much better off reading the

    price: float
    tax: float | None = None
    tags: set[str] = set()


@app.post("/items/", response_model=Item, summary="Create an item")
async def create_item(item: Item):
    """
    Create an item with all the information:

    - **name**: each item must have a name
    - **description**: a long description
    - **price**: required
    - **tax**: if the item doesn't have tax, you can omit this