Likewise, Django has had third-party hstore and jsonb fields for ages, but I take your point. SQLAlchemy is beautiful.
The Django ORM has taken great strides lately. Another big improvement in 1.8 is the expansion of database expressions – you can now combine arbitrary database functions and columns as you can in SQLAlchemy. This is a big step towards a cleaner, logically consistent API, and makes extensibility (like that offered in the new contrib.postgres) much easier.
Django's ORM also does things that SQLAlchemy's doesn't. Even at its highest level SQLAlchemy requires explicit joins AFAIK.
That said the Django team is aware of SQLAlchemy's arguable superiority and there have been numerous proposals to integrate it somehow. The most likely plan would be to use SQLAlchemy core to replace the low-level SQL generation. That way you could take a Django queryset and get its SQLAlchemy representation, then continue building from there.
The Django ORM has taken great strides lately. Another big improvement in 1.8 is the expansion of database expressions – you can now combine arbitrary database functions and columns as you can in SQLAlchemy. This is a big step towards a cleaner, logically consistent API, and makes extensibility (like that offered in the new contrib.postgres) much easier.
Django's ORM also does things that SQLAlchemy's doesn't. Even at its highest level SQLAlchemy requires explicit joins AFAIK.
That said the Django team is aware of SQLAlchemy's arguable superiority and there have been numerous proposals to integrate it somehow. The most likely plan would be to use SQLAlchemy core to replace the low-level SQL generation. That way you could take a Django queryset and get its SQLAlchemy representation, then continue building from there.