I've loved plain old SQL for years, but have recently started using sqlalchemy's declarative ORM extensively in my company's data analysis work-flow. It means I

I've loved plain old SQL for years, but have recently started using sqlalchemy's declarative ORM extensively in my company's data analysis work-flow. It means I can provide a database as a python library, which is great when I'm trying to encourage more of our electrical and mechanical engineers to use notebooks for their data analysis tasks instead of excel. Not only can they get data out without learning SQL, but they can also have a look at the relevant models.py any time they get stuck, and see the entire schema and all of it's relationships clearly spelled out. Worth pointing out that the three databases that I have set up like this are all read-only, which certainly makes it easier to design an elegant API. YMMV