I'm pretty sure that SqlAlchemy has caused more grief and frustration than any other single library. After all if I didn't know about the excellence of SqlAlchemy, maybe I wouldn't get so cross when I have to do anything non-trivial with the Django ORM ;)

Joking aside, SwlAlchemy is very impressive software, and zzzeek deserves all this praise and more. Every time that there's one of these anti-ORM articles I feel like SqlAlchemy pre-emtively addressed all the substantive criticisms in its flexible, well layered, design.

(And in the interests of fairness, Django's ORM is also very good at making simple things simple).

+1 SQLAlchemy has had a solution for every problem I threw at it in 5 years of heavy use!

I want to give thanks to all the SqlAlchemy devs!

I am a huge fan of the custom column types -- they have allowed me to have code that works against SQLite as well as a production databases with ease!

+1 - personally I really like how SQLAlchemy doesn’t abstract away the database so much where all modeling and power is lost. He and the contributors have done an excellent job.

I've always been impressed by zzzeek's near-omnipresent participation. Years ago, I had a question about SQLAlchemy that he'd answered on the mailing list which amazed me given the relative rarity of developer interaction. Yet here we are almost a decade later and he's still answering questions directly, but on many more platforms. I'm actually not convinced he ever sleeps.

I wish more people aspired to be like him, because you know there's no more authoritative answer when you run into a Stack Exchange post and he's offering up his assistance.

+1 SQLAlechemy is an excellent library. Zzzeek, many kind thanks for such a good ORM.

thanks very much and also to all the other great commenters on this thread!