News and Updates

The third beta release of the SQLAlchemy 2.1 series is now available.

Release 2.1.0b3 brings a focused set of new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. With no major regressions reported against 2.1.0b2, we are hoping this release will be the last beta before a final 2.1.0 release, targeting end of summer 2026.

Highlights of this release include:

• ORM Loading Performance Improvements - ORM result row fetching now processes rows as plain tuples rather than constructing Row objects, since ORM loaders use position-based access and do not require the Row interface. Additional optimizations were made to selectinload and subqueryload result handling. Benchmarks show a 3-16% improvement in ORM entity load times depending on query shape. Thanks to Oliver Parker for this work.
• selectinload omit_join for Many-to-Many - The selectinload loader strategy now applies the omit_join optimization automatically for many-to-many non-self-referential relationships, selecting from the secondary (association) table directly rather than joining back to the parent entity, reducing the number of JOINs in the emitted SELECT.
• SQLite JSONB Type - A new JSONB type supports SQLite's binary JSON storage format, available as of SQLite version 3.45.0. Values are stored and retrieved using the jsonb() / json() SQL functions while Python-side behavior remains identical to JSON. Thanks to Shamil Abdulaev.
• selectinload chunksize Parameter - A new chunksize parameter on selectinload allows configuring the number of primary keys sent per IN clause when loading relationships, giving applications control over query size for very large result sets. Thanks to bekapono.
• Delete.using() for Multi-Table DELETE - A new Delete.using() method allows explicit FROM expressions to be rendered in backend-specific multiple-table DELETE forms, including MySQL/MariaDB DELETE .. USING. Thanks to cjc0013.
• SQL Server Bulk Reflection - The SQL Server dialect now implements native multi-table reflection methods, issuing a single bulk query per object type against the sys.* catalog views rather than a per-table round trip loop, matching the pattern already used by the PostgreSQL and Oracle dialects. Thanks to Gaurav Sharma.
• Session execution_options for Unit of Work Core SQL - Session-level execution_options now take effect for Core-level SQL emitted by unit of work operations, in addition to ORM statement executions. This allows options such as schema_translate_map to be applied to a Session globally.

SQLAlchemy 2.1 includes over 90 individual documented changes across all betas, so be sure to check out not just the What's New in SQLAlchemy 2.1? migration guide, but the detailed changelog at Changelog as well.

SQLAlchemy 2.1.0b3 by naming convention is a beta release, so only installs with pip if the --pre flag is included. Links to pypi for SQLAlchemy 2.1.0b3 are available on the Download Page.