I'm still fairly new to Python, but the only part of your How-To that, IMHO, might be written a little more simply is the code fragment in the "What is res?" section:

fields2index={} fieldnames=res._schema.items() for i in range(len(fieldnames)): fields2index[fieldnames[i][0]]=fieldnames[i][1]

which might read more clearly as:

fields2index = {} for name, index in res._schema.items(): fields2index[ name ] = index

Don't forget that you can call a field directly by both getitem and getattr: res=someSqlMethod(name='bob', relation='uncle') for r in res: #loop through the result set, r is a Record object if r.age < 12: #do something for young uncles here else: #do something else for everyone older. AGE is a column in the results set. There's a lot of meta-data in Record objects that can generally be avoided in common programming.