SQLAlchemy is a famous SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper. It is written in Python and offers complete electricity and versatility of SQL to an software developer. It is an open source and go-platform software program released below MIT license.
SQLAlchemy is famous for its object-relational mapper (ORM), the usage of which, classes can be mapped to the database, thereby allowing the item model and database schema to expand in a cleanly decoupled manner from the beginning.
As length and overall performance of SQL databases begin to matter, they behave much less like item collections. On the alternative hand, as abstraction in item collections begins to rely, they behave less like tables and rows. SQLAlchemy pursuits to accommodate both of these standards.
For this purpose, it has adopted the records mapper pattern (like Hibernate) instead of the energetic document sample utilized by a number of different ORMs. Databases and SQL might be considered in a unique attitude using SQLAlchemy.
Michael Bayer is the authentic author of SQLAlchemy. Its initial model was released in February 2006. Latest version is numbered as 1.2.7, released as currently as in April 2018.
What is ORM?
ORM (Object Relational Mapping) is a programming technique for changing statistics between incompatible type systems in item-oriented programming languages. Usually, the kind gadget used in an Object Oriented (OO) language like Python incorporates non-scalar types. These can't be expressed as primitive sorts including integers and strings. Hence, the OO programmer has to transform gadgets in scalar records to engage with backend database. However, facts types in most of the database merchandise which includes Oracle, MySQL, etc., are primary.
In an ORM device, each magnificence maps to a desk in the underlying database. Instead of writing tedious database interfacing code your self, an ORM takes care of those problems for you even as you could recognition on programming the logics of the gadget.
SQLAlchemy - Environment setup
Let us talk the environmental setup required to apply SQLAlchemy.
Any version of Python higher than 2.7 is vital to put in SQLAlchemy. The simplest way to install is by way of using Python Package Manager, pip. This application is bundled with trendy distribution of Python.
pip install sqlalchemy
Using the above command, we will down load the modern-day launched version of SQLAlchemy from python.Org and deploy it for your machine.
In case of anaconda distribution of Python, SQLAlchemy may be established from conda terminal the use of the beneath command −
conda install -c anaconda sqlalchemy
It is also viable to put in SQLAlchemy from below source code −
python setup.py install
SQLAlchemy is designed to perform with a DBAPI implementation built for a selected database. It makes use of dialect device to talk with numerous forms of DBAPI implementations and databases. All dialects require that the right DBAPI motive force is installed.
The following are the dialects blanketed −
- Firebird
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MySQL
- Oracle
- PostgreSQL
- SQLite
- Sybase
To take a look at if SQLAlchemy is properly set up and to understand its version, enter the following command within the Python spark off −
>>> import sqlalchemy
>>>sqlalchemy.__version__
'1.2.7'