SQLAlchemy is an open source, platform-independent and free library software written in the Python programing language and designed from the ground up to act as a database abstraction library, ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and SQL toolkit for Python.

If you’re a Python developer, SQLAlchemy will give you the full flexibility and power of SQL, providing a complete collection of popular enterprise-level persistence patterns, which have been designed for high-performing and efficient database access.

The software is extremely easy to use, powerful enough for sophisticated tasks, and modular. With SQLAlchemy you will be able to organize pending CRUD operations, allows the use of boolean expressions, functions, operators, table aliases, UNION clauses, correlated EXISTS clauses, create, insert, delete and update queries, selectable subqueries, correlated updates, inner and outer joins, and bind parameters.

It can be used to generate databases, as well as to introspect them, support for loading related objects and collections, support for creating transparent persistence of objects based on patterns, support for manipulating and constructing domain models, as well as support for synchronizing all the changes with the current transaction automatically.

Among other features, we can mention a relationally-oriented query system that’s capable of exposing all of SQL’s functionality, including correlation, joins and subqueries, a DBAPI interaction layer, a core SQL construction system, a complete, standalone database abstraction layer, support for extensible SQL schema metadata, expression language, connection pooling, custom types and type coercion.

The program includes dialects for a wide variety of database servers and engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, Sybase, and many others.

The project is independent of an operating system, which means that it can be easily deployed and used on any GNU/Linux distribution, as well as on the Microsoft Windows, BSD or Mac OS X operating systems. Both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures are supported at this time.