Chapter A.1. A Quick Tour of SQLAlchemy

SQLAlchemy, which was first announced in October 2005, is a newer object relational mapper (ORM) than SQLObject. SQLAlchemy is influenced by Hibernate, SQLObject, and others; and can handle a number of cases that are difficult or impossible for SQLObject.

SQLAlchemy’s power comes from a few different aspects of its design:

  1. It has an explicit, separate database-independent SQL generation layer.

  2. Its ORM is built with the Data Mapper pattern (we’ll talk more about Data Mapper in section A.3).

  3. Its “unit-of-work” approach makes its basic object caching clear.

In addition, SQLAlchemy has some features that SQLObject lacks. It offers Oracle support and better support for compound and noninteger primary keys. ...

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