Thanks for this release. Learning SQL before ever touching an ORM, SQLAlchemy's approach makes a lot more sense to me than something "simplier" like Django's ORM. Anyone know, is there any chance Django would pull in SQLAlchemy core as a dependency and implement their ORM on top of it?
That said, I have on occasion floated an alternative idea, which is to basically port the Django configurational and query system to SQLAlchemy entirely, doing away with full backwards compatibility and essentially providing a "transitional" platform, where you take an existing Django application and basically run it on top of a new ORM layer that actually uses the SQLAlchemy Session and unit of work model, but the majority of the Django configuration and queryset behavior remains available, thus making porting a relatively painless process (but still, there'd be a porting process). This approach has two advantages. One is, it's actually doable, we're providing a new platform and not trying to duplicate an existing one. The other is, we're actually delivering to a Django application some of the biggest advantages SQLAlchemy has, which are namely the ORM features like unit of work/identity map, the instrumentation model including collections and eager loading support, and inheritance support.
Nobody has time / motivation for that idea either, but I think if it ever happened, it would be more pragmatic.