News and Updates

SQLAlchemy 2.1.0, the first production release of SQLAlchemy 2.1, is now available.

With this release, the default version of SQLAlchemy that will install when one runs pip install sqlalchemy will be version 2.1.

Release 2.1 is decidedly not as dramatic of a change as the original 2.0 release was, and upgrade paths are not expected to be difficult. However, the release still has a series of "hard" changes that may require adjustments in workflow.

Major changes include:

• The greenlet dependency, used for all asyncio features, no longer installs by default. Use pip install sqlalchemy[asyncio] to include this dependency.
• New default drivers for PostgreSQL, Oracle - if using URLs of the form postgresql:// or oracle:// without a specific driver name, the driver selected will be psycopg (also known as psycopg3) and oracledb, respectively.
• Python 3.11 is the minimum version - Python 3.10 is set to be EOL in a little over a week. Supporting EOL Python versions has become much more difficult over the years as reliance on third party tools like pip, nox, Github Actions, etc. push out older Python versions aggressively.

Marquee-level features added include:

• Support for T-Strings - A variant of the text() construct called tstring() allows for dynamically indicated bind parameters in plain string SQL statements
• CREATE VIEW and CREATE TABLE AS support - this finally adds the CreateView strucutre referred to in recipes for many years
• Support for Microsoft's SQL Server Driver - working closely with the Microsoft team, SQLAlchemy 2.1 introduces support for the mssql-python driver.

The list of changes and improvements is quite long as the SQLAlchemy 2.1 release is three years after the 2.0 release.

Be sure to check out the What's New in SQLAlchemy 2.1? migration guide, as well as the detailed changelog at Changelog.

SQLAlchemy 2.1.0 is available on the Download Page.