Features and Philosophy
An overview of what SQLAlchemy is about.
- Philosophy Statement - SQLAlchemy's Philosophy
- Features - overview of major features
- Quotes - user quotes
What People are Saying about SQLAlchemy
SQLAlchemy is probably the one library in which I've never reached the"wait, I need to do something and can't" point. Every single weirdedge case I've had to handle has been supported either natively or bybeing able to access the raw interfaces directly in a clean way.Fantastic library, can't recommend it more highly.
A really solid, perhaps unique, library that, as far as i can tell,completely addresses the "impedence mismatch" argument. If you'redirectly using a database api in a structured way, you've probablyalready reimplemented the sqlalchemy core, and refactoring yourprogram to use sqlalchemy will give you an orm, should you want one,and make your code portable across database implementations even ifyou don't. If you're already using an orm, refactoring to usesqlalchemy will allow you to to start optimizing the low-leveldatabase operations in a coherent way (i.e. not just sprinkling SQLthroughout the models).
I'm the biggest proponent of correct, thought-of, and performant SQL whereI work, and I have to say that one ORM/database driver combination shifted myopinions towards ORMs.
When you use SQLAlchemy (an ORM for python), you feel in complete controlof what is done for you behind the scenes.
First of all, they had the brilliant idea to build an abstraction over sqlBEFORE building an ORM, so that if you do not want to work with objects mappedto your table, you can work with dictionaries directly, using a nicesql-generation api which allows you to refactor/check your sql code in abreeze.
Second, the ORM itself is fantastic. I don't really know how to explain it,but you always feel in control of what happens. And if anything does not worklike you expect it to, you can always extend the framework. It is extremelywell suited for that.
I demand SQLAlchemy to be renamed to SQLAwesome. No particular reason.
-Armin Ronacher, author of the Flask web framework, Jinja templates
SQLAlchemy is one of the best designed libraries I have ever used for anysoftware task, period. I've done all sorts of crazy reflexive joins with it,used the meta programming capabilities to bootstrap my ORM from nothing, addedmy own rails like scope features to the session maker, etc. SQLAlchemy justplain works(TM). If you're a Python guy, learning it is one of the best thingsyou can do.
...it's the kind of library that not only solves the need it addresses butrecommends the language it's written in--when I think about a language otherthan Python for some project involving a database my first thought is always,'but what would replace SQLAlchemy?'
Lost faith in ORMs after many battles with Hibernate/Entity Framework/whatnot. SQLAlchemy restores it. ORM done right.
-Jan-Erik Strøm
There’s a lot of Python libraries/frameworks out there we can use, and some ofthem are a big advantage to write web services. SQLAlchemy is one that comesin mind, that is one of the best ORM/DB tool out there, all languagesincluded, to my knowledge.
-Tarek Ziadé, core Firefox Sync developer
Loving #SQLAlchemy for #Python right now. It just did 95% of the heavy lifting for me. "Lazy" programming is the best!
Then realized I have schema defined in SQLAlchemy. Used it to recreate my schema in PostgreSQL. Booyah.Best ORM I've seen. In any language.
#sqlalchemy is seriously the best ORM. No other ORM in any other language even comes close.
The only toolkit that's even better? SQLAlchemy. It's pretty much the onlyway I'll interact with RDBMS systems in Python from this point out. And Idon't mean I'll be writing every RDBMS interaction as an object-relationalmapping. SQLAlchemy is great because it provides a good connection / poolinginfrastructure; a good Pythonic query building infrastructure; and then a goodORM infrastructure that is capable of complex queries and mappings (as well assome pretty stone-simple ones).
I've been using SQLAlchemy for about two days now and I can tell you, it'swithout compare. The ORM is the most flexible I've ever seen. It's freakingmagic.
Just for a moment, I thought I'd found something SQLAlchemydoesn't do perfectly.
-S. Lott
As a user of all kinds of ORMs and a write of plenty of my own, I've got tosay I am extremely impressed by SQLAlchemy...It is wonderfully documented, andhas a great philosophy. If you are using anything else, you should definitelytry this.
-Andy Smith
Very sweet, and very quick to get going on my Mac development and Linuxdeployment environments. I'm currently collecting data from three differentdatabases (SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySql) on five different servers. This is akiller app for me.I'll be exploring its object-relational capabilities soon, but I am alreadyvery fond of the framework, and how lightweight it feels.
-Bruce Kroeze
Using SQLAlchemy has certainly changed the way I think about database accesswhen I'm designing an application.
