News and Updates

SQLAlchemy release 1.4.0 is now available.

After three beta releases in the 1.4 series, Release 1.4.0 is finally available. This is the most extensive release for SQLAlchemy in at least ten years, featuring a major rethink of the most prominent APIs in Core and ORM, vastly revised internals, and a wide range of significant new features and capabilities.

SQLAlchemy 1.4 establishes itself as the starting point for the SQLAlchemy 2.0 project, which will move fully to Python 3 only as well as finalize the new APIs introduced in release 1.4.0.

The topmost highlights of SQLAlchemy 1.4.0 include:

• The approach used to generate SELECT and other SQL statements for both Core and ORM is now unified around a revised and more-capable select() construct, so that SQL queries targeted to either a Core or ORM context are now composed using the same APIs and patterns. The Session.execute() and Connection.execute() methods have been aligned so that the transition between Core and ORM queries and result sets are seamless, with both systems behaving as similarly as is practical to each other. A new emphasis on explicitness and unambiguous consistency intends to allow both learning and using SQLAlchemy to be more straightforward, while also supporting new Python paradigms such as asyncio and PEP-484 typing.
• A revised Declarative mapping system which provides support for many new mapping paradigms, including mapping classes using decorators instead of base classes, explicit support for Python dataclasses, and "imperative mappings" which are are an improved version of classical mapper() operations that integrate with the Declarative class registry.
• Universal and fully transparent caching of SQL compilation for both Core and ORM. This replaces the "baked query cache" system of previous releases that provided an optional SQL caching system for the ORM, with a new approach that is fully transparent and enabled for the vast majority of DML and DQL statements across both Core and ORM. This system caches not only the immediate SQL string for a statement but also its associated result-processing infrastructure that is used to generate new rows and ORM object instances for each query.
• A newly revised transactional model for both the Core Engine as well as the ORM Session which is simpler to work with, eliminates legacy APIs that have become confusing, and operates in a more consistent fashion than before. The new transactional model, which will be the only model in SQLAlchemy 2.0, can be enabled fully under 1.4 by passing the future=True flag to the create_engine() function as well as the Session() constructor.
• Complete support for Python asyncio for both Core and ORM. This new system leverages the greenlet context-switching library to adapt the entirety of SQLAlchemy to be usable behind a very thin asyncio front-end while operating directly against asyncio database drivers within the asyncio event loop, with no need for thread executors. Support for asyncpg and aiomysql is included so far with more drivers in development.
• Vastly improved ORM querying extensibility, using new hooks and options including the SessionEvents.do_orm_execute() hook and the with_loader_criteria() function which together can reliably and predictably intercept and modify all ORM queries with additional criteria; do_orm_execute() itself proves its worth by now being the only hook required to implement both the "horizontal sharding" (multiplexing a single query among many databases) and the "dogpile caching" (pre-empting queries with a cached Result object) examples.
• Native support for PEP-484 and Mypy is now underway, with the first alpha version of an all new Mypy plugin included which operates with a newly published stubs library sqlalchemy2-stubs.

Release 1.4 would not have been possible without the help of hundreds of contributors as well as our recently expanded team of dedicated maintainers; we would like to give HUGE thanks to Federico Caselli, Gord Thompson, Jonathan Vanasco, and Ramon Williams for their massive efforts in fielding hundreds of issues and working to implement major new features, as well as our frequent user-support contributors including Alex Grönholm and Simon King.

For users migrating from 1.3, the first stop is the What's New in 1.4? document which will provide an overview of how to get started with SQLAlchemy 1.4.

The complete changelog for 1.4.0 as well as all the beta releases is at Changelog.

SQLAlchemy 1.4.0 is available on the Download Page.