ORM/Database Tools

SQLAlchemy11.7k★

If you're writing Python that talks to a database — Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server — SQLAlchemy is the toolkit that lets you do it without writing raw SQL everywhere. It works at two levels: a low-level 'Core' that maps Python expressions to SQL, and a high-level ORM that lets you work with database rows as Python objects. Fully free under MIT. This is foundational Python infrastructure — 11K stars undersells its importance because virtually every Python web framework uses it. Flask, FastAPI, and dozens of others either integrate with or recommend SQLAlchemy. Version 2.0 modernized the API significantly with better typing and async support. The catch: the learning curve is real. SQLAlchemy gives you maximum control, which means maximum things to learn — sessions, engines, connection pools, lazy loading, eager loading, relationship cascades. If you just want a simple ORM without the complexity, Peewee or Tortoise ORM are simpler. And if your queries are complex enough, you'll end up writing raw SQL anyway through SQLAlchemy's text() function. The abstraction helps most in the 80% of cases that are straightforward CRUD.