SQLAlchemy is great, but for those who are looking for something lighter, I highly recommend Peewee (https://github.com/coleifer/peewee). It's a very well maintained alternative.
git checkout --recursive, etc.
Or just a symlink and include it in your setup.py. Or check it out inside your project.
Still allows better organized code. Given, the alternatives are very metaclass heavy black magic, and sometimes spare on comments - actually nearly all ORMs are very heavy on the black magic :)
If you've got wifi/ethernet, configuration through web servers comes naturally.
Even without using the ORM part, the database objects have information to help me roll my own cross-database SQL calls using a bit of string substitution so "?" becomes "%s", etc.
1: http://docs.peewee-orm.com/en/latest/peewee/playhouse.html