Python and databases

Why does Python not have a standardised database API, like Perl's DBI? I want my database code to be as generic as possible in case I change the RDBMS later. Any tips?

It does: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/

See also: http://initd.org/pub/software/psycopg/dbapi20programming.pdf

And to make it generic, use import [i]<name of database module>[/i] as db and reference db instead of the module name.