News and Updates

The SQLAlchemy project is pleased to announce version 0.7.0 of SQLAlchemy, the first production release within the 0.7 series. 0.7 represents the past year's worth of development, streamlining APIs, adding new features, solidifying the core and improving performance. Key highlights of version 0.7 include:

• New event system applies a consistent and flexible approach to the task of extending SQLAlchemy, both within the core and the ORM. The previous system of ad-hoc "extension" and "listener" classes is replaced by a single function event.listen() which can apply listeners to a wide variety of hooks. Read more at Intro to events.
• A new extension allows easy creation of "hybrid" attributes, attributes that provide Python expression behavior at the instance level and SQL expression behavior at the declarative (class) level. Read more at Hybrid Attributes.
• A new system of building so-called "mutable" attributes, column-mapped values which can change their value in-place. Detection of changes now uses change events and solves the previous issue of full unit-of-work scans for such attributes. Read more at Mutable Scalars.
• Major speed improvements, including batching of INSERT statements when possible, greatly reduced codepaths for many key operations. Check out the RunSnakeRun diagrams at A Tale of Three Profiles.
• C extensions, battle tested after a year of use in 0.6, now build by default on install for CPython platforms.
• Pypy is fully supported.
• Dialect support for Psycopg2 on Python 3, Drizzle, pymysql added.
• Documentation and example updates, including a modernized, declarative version of polymorphic associations.
• Many, many core and ORM behavioral improvements. See the almost-full list at 07Migration.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed via code, bug reports, infrastructure support, production testing. SQLAlchemy 0.7.0 is available on the download page.