In SQLAlchemy, you can choose to use only the query builder without using the ORM part at all. The query builder in SQLAlchemy is very well documented[1] and it

In SQLAlchemy, you can choose to use only the query builder without using the ORM part at all. The query builder in SQLAlchemy is very well documented[1] and its use without ORM has the same level of support as its ORM counterpart. SQLAlchemy call their query builder a SQL Expression Language[2], e.g. # Boilerplate from sqlalchemy import create_engine, MetaData, Table engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', echo=True) metadata = MetaData() customers = Table('customers', metadata, autoload_with=engine) query = customers.select([customers.c.id, customers.c.fname, customers.c.lname, customers.c.phone]) # => SELECT customers.id, customers.fname, customers.lname, customers.phone FROM customers conn = engine.connect() conn.execute(query) # => [(1, "Foo", "Bar", "12345678"), ...] ActiveRecord also has Arel which can be use as a standalone. Documentation is a bit more sparse compared to SQLAlchemy Core or its ActiveRecord ORM counterpart, though. [1]: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/index.html https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/index.html [1]: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/core/tutorial.html https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/core/tutorial.html