Show HN: Advanced-Alchemy – A framework agnostic library for SQLAlchemy

14 points by Kumzy 4 hours ago

Hello HN!

Advanced Alchemy is an optimized companion library for SQLAlchemy, designed to supercharge your database models with powerful tooling for migrations, asynchronous support, lifecycle hook and more.

You can find the repository and documentation here:

    - GitHub Repository: https://github.com/litestar-org/advanced-alchemy
    - Official Documentation : https://docs.advanced-alchemy.litestar.dev/latest/

Advanced-Alchemy extends SQLAlchemy with productivity-enhancing features, while keeping full compatibility with the ecosystem you already know.

At its core, Advanced-Alchemy offers:

- Sync and async repositories, featuring common CRUD and highly optimized bulk operations

- Integration with major web frameworks including Litestar, Starlette, FastAPI, Sanic

- Custom-built alembic configuration and CLI with optional framework integration

- Utility base classes with audit columns, primary keys and utility functions

- Built in File Object data type for storing objects:

    - Unified interface for various storage backends fsspec and obstore
    - Optional lifecycle event hooks integrated with SQLAlchemy's event system to automatically save and delete files as records are inserted, updated, or deleted.

- Optimized JSON types including a custom JSON type for Oracle

- Integrated support for UUID6 and UUID7 using uuid-utils

- Integrated support for Nano ID using fastnanoid

- Pre-configured base classes with audit columns UUID or Big Integer primary keys and a sentinel column.

- Synchronous and asynchronous repositories featuring:

    - Common CRUD operations for SQLAlchemy models
    - Bulk inserts, updates, upserts, and deletes with dialect-specific enhancements
    - Integrated counts, pagination, sorting, filtering with LIKE, IN, and dates before and/or after.

- Tested support for multiple database backends including:

    - SQLite via aiosqlite or sqlite
    - Postgres via asyncpg or psycopg3 (async or sync)
    - MySQL via asyncmy
    - Oracle via oracledb (async or sync) (tested on 18c and 23c)
    - Google Spanner via spanner-sqlalchemy
    - DuckDB via duckdb_engine
    - Microsoft SQL Server via pyodbc or aioodbc
    - CockroachDB via sqlalchemy-cockroachdb (async or sync)

The framework is designed to be lightweight yet powerful, with a clean API that makes it easy to integrate into existing projects.

You can find a full example using FastAPI there: https://docs.advanced-alchemy.litestar.dev/latest/usage/fram...

There are custom datatypes, a service and repository (including optimized bulk operations), and native integration with Flask, FastAPI, Starlette, Litestar and Sanic.

Feedback and enhancements are always welcomed! We have an active discord community, so if you don't get a response on an issue or would like to chat directly with the dev team, please reach out.

The library: https://github.com/litestar-org/advanced-alchemy

whalesalad 2 minutes ago

I have had so much success with raw psycopg2 and hand-crafted SQL queries. SQLAchemy was always a pain to use, and this looks like another layer of pain on top of that. Six+ months from now when there are breaking changes in an underlying API this library will be more of a liability than anything else in your stack.

Noumenon72 40 minutes ago

I'm using SQLAlchemy, Alembic, and FastAPI. Either this is for someone much more advanced than me, or it could use some examples showing "This is clunky in SQLAlchemy and easy in Advanced-Alchemy." When you look at SQLModel[1] from FastAPI, which I did adopt, it does a much better job at promising "this will make your life easier".

1. https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/

zo1 23 minutes ago

FastAPI and it's very opinionated "ecosystem" of "easy to use" and "hipster-esque documented" tools are fast-becoming a horrible one-man show version of Django, and we will all regret going so deep into it using it, one day. Until then, sure we can use it and it mostly makes sense and it mostly works really very well. Hopefully the community matures and moves away from opinionated tooling that forces you into the "one true way".

arewethereyeta 24 minutes ago

I don't think I ever worked with an ORM that turned against me more than SQLAlchemy and that's not because it's badly written, on the contrary.

stuaxo an hour ago

Code examples could be further forward, I clicked around a bit and didn't see any on the initial pages.

canadiantim an hour ago

Nice, love seeing litestar continue improving!