django-sqlalchemy
This is a project that pairs the best of both worlds. Django has since the beginning been using its own ORM, I’m guessing for ease of development, which makes sense. Would’ve been tedious trying to follow another project while developing itself.
SQLAlchemy has for a long time been a favorite of mine, Michael Bayer is doing an excellent job directing the project, hats off to him, seriously. I’m using this heavily on several pet projects, and all too often, I’ve wished that I had it in Django.
Djangos ORM has long been a pet peeve of mine; not because it is bad or in any way not well written, but because it’s another paradigm for me to learn when working with databases. ORMs are great, but even then, it’s preferable to stick to one, and one only. Also when coding cron-scripts or whatever standalone Django things, the ability to hook up to an existing ORM and not having to crowbar yourself into a webapp paradigm, is, well, wonderful.
In a more practical angle, SQLAlchemy also offers some nifties that Django’s ORM does not. Things such as extended backend support (Oracle, Firebird, DB2, and heaps more), sharding (like that of Java Hibernate) and of course, connection pooling.
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