Is there something easier than ORM?

[Tim Golden]

Philip Semanchuk wrote:
[... snip comments on SqlAlchemy which could likewise apply
to other similar offerings ...]


> I don't intend this as a criticism of SqlAlchemy. On the contrary I am 
> impressed by what it does. But I often see people promoting ORM as the 
> solution to all database access problems, and I certainly don't feel 
> like it is.


I'm with you: I'm very glad that so many people find SA (and Storm
and Mother & SQLObject etc. useful). Personally, I earn my living
designing, maintaining and coding for relational databases and I'm
simply more at home in native SQL. 

If you're on Windows, pyodbc offers you a general spread of databases 
and has quite a few conveniences such as named rows returned; it's
fairly robust and is actively maintained. I imagine that most people
who do this kind of thing long ago put together a simple wrapper
module (mine's imaginatively called "sql") which does just enough
to be useful but then gets out the way.

All that said, if you don't *want* to have to think about SQL
then something like SA + Elixir is about as useful a combination
as I've found.

TJG