News and Updates

We are pleased to announce that the first beta release of SQLAlchemy 2.0 is now available.

The 2.0 series represents over three years of effort towards updating SQLAlchemy's usage model and architectures for modern Python use. The update's origins lie within the three major Python paradigms that came into existence well after SQLAlchemy's first releases in 2006: Python 3, pep-484 typing support, and asyncio. It's also in response to the changing nature of the Python programming community, vastly larger and home to many new developers with higher standards for strictness, ease of use and documentation than was the case sixteen years ago.

While the SQLAlchemy 1.4 series introduced the major architectural changes to internals, including the integration of Core SQL constructs within the ORM, full SQL caching support, and asyncio support, the SQLAlchemy 2.0 series now capitalizes on this architecture within many areas, including most prominently:

• Complete pep-484 typing support and native compatibility with typing tools such as mypy, pylance, including annotation-based Declarative models and fully typed SQL statements (make sure you uninstall all sqlalchemy-stubs, sqlalchemy2-stubs packages)
• Vastly more performant INSERT behavior within the ORM
• Vastly more performant table reflection architecture
• Integration of pure SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE statements including RETURNING of objects, upsert within normal ORM use

SQLAlchemy 2.0 also finalizes a very large number of API changes first introduced in 1.4. As such, even though SQLAlchemy 1.4 provided a very comprehensive upgrade path, we expect there to be lots of issues within the beginning of the series, both as projects accommodate the changes as well as for users of the new features, in particular the Declarative annotation support. We therefore hope that the beta series will have lots of testing done, and we will likely move from beta releases into release candidates as well, anticipating a 2.0 final release after some months.

For an overview of whats new in SQLAlchemy 2.0, see the Whats New in SQLAlchemy 2.0? document.

Links to the detailed changelog for 2.0.0b1 is at Changelog.

SQLAlchemy 2.0.0b1 is available on the Download Page.