No they aren't, this just looks like an itch that has been scratched. Outside of the ORM libraries there isn't much fanfare for this sort of thing though. I sp

No they aren't, this just looks like an itch that has been scratched. Outside of the ORM libraries there isn't much fanfare for this sort of thing though. I spent a couple of hours looking for exactly this yesterday for a new Tornado based project and ended up using queries: https://github.com/gmr/queries https://github.com/gmr/queries which seems on the same level for my purposes of wanting to cleanly pass raw SQL and get python data structures in return. Queries also provides asynchronous API interaction with Tornado which will be nice for me. Coincidently queries was inspired by Kenneth Reitz's work on requests. I think it is often tempting to write something like this as it is quite a light thing and can reacquaint someone with SQL if they haven't used it for a while. I know I was tempted after pouring through ORMs.