What you're describing is an eDSL (embedded DSL). The syntax of SQL is embedded in the host language, which allows you to use the host language's constructs to

What you're describing is an eDSL (embedded DSL). The syntax of SQL is embedded in the host language, which allows you to use the host language's constructs to compose bits of SQL. It's not 'non-OO ORM' code the developer is writing, it's just SQL with Python syntax. Also I highly recommend SQLAlchemy core! Another example of this would be Pandas for Python, the code the developer writes looks like Python, but the DSL provided actually translate to Fortran & C. There's also a project called Dask which reimplements the backend for Pandas' DSL to run distributed. I wish there was an equivalent for pyspark :)