You may of course already be aware of this but it's worth pointing out. To many, SQLAlchemy is an ORM, but the SA developers very purposefully made the ORM layer completely optional. The SQLAlchamy-Core layer can be used to functionally compose queries without mapping types at all, and below that, SA can be used as an abstract but featureful generic client for executing just raw SQL.

FYI, you can also execute queries directly against a database in SQLAlchemy:

    engine = create_engine('mysql://scott:tiger@localhost/test')
    connection = engine.connect()
    result = connection.execute("select username from users")
    for row in result:
        print("username:", row['username'])
    connection.close()