For what it's worth, if SQLAlchemy (or any other ORM) is slow, it's probably not because of "serialization" and "deserialization" (of whatever you had in mind),

For what it's worth, if SQLAlchemy (or any other ORM) is slow, it's probably not because of "serialization" and "deserialization" (of whatever you had in mind), but because the database is queried in a (really, really) inefficient way. It's also unclear how that's related to whether you're working in an async environment or not. He was probably thinking about stuff like that.