News and Updates

The first beta release of the SQLAlchemy 1.4 series, 1.4.0b1, is now available.

Release 1.4.0b1 is the culmination of nearly 18 months of effort to envision and create a newly modernized and capable SQLAlchemy, containing the widest range of changes in many years. The first stop along the way to SQLAlchemy 2.0, release 1.4 intends to provide a gradual introduction of a newly revised and simplified way of working with both Core and ORM. A combination of major API refinements and capabilities hopes to provide a toolkit that is well suited towards the modern direction of the Python programming language and its associated communities.

Top level changes include:

• A simpler and more consistent way to work with transactions, connections and ORM Sessions with unified patterns of use across Core and ORM.
• The select() construct is highly refined and now serves as the universal way to create SELECT statements across Core and ORM; the new Result object unifies how results are handled across both components and adds a great many capabilities.
• Transparent SQL-caching is now present in all cases, greatly reducing the latency to generate SQL for a persistently running application, including the majority of ORM-related SQL generation work; the previous extension-based approach to SQL caching is no longer needed
• Python asyncio support is now fully integrated for both Core and ORM, to provide one of the first fully capable Python object relational mappers for asyncio
• New mapper configuration paradigms unify both Declarative and "classical" mapping forms, adds support for Python dataclasses and others.

The 1.4 series serves as the migration gateway for applications to be compatible with the to-be-developed SQLAlchemy 2.0 release, which will move to Python 3 only and standardize completely on the new APIs and usage paradigms.

The ultimate goal of the 1.4 / 2.0 series is to make SQLAlchemy easier to learn, more consistent and more reliable.

A huge number of contributors as well as our core development team has helped tremendously in getting us to the first beta and everyone deserves our deepest thanks and gratitude.

The migration guide for SQLAlchemy 1.4 is the best place to start in order to get an overview of what's happening: What's New in 1.4?. The complete changelog is at Changelog.

SQLAlchemy 1.4.0b1 by naming convention is a beta release, so only installs with pip if the --pre flag is included. Links to pypi for SQLAlchemy 1.4.0b1 are available on the Download Page.