Yes, both of those are alternative solutions. Using a wrapper like SQLAlchemy is probably an improvement for most medium and large projects, but it has costs o

Yes, both of those are alternative solutions. Using a wrapper like SQLAlchemy is probably an improvement for most medium and large projects, but it has costs of its own. Using portable ANSI SQL - above the Hello World level - is something basically nobody does unless they make a serious effort, lean on linting tools and forego some of the most useful features of their DBMS. sh is perhaps a closer comparison than C here: it's at least possible to write portable C accidentally. And neither of these help you if you started with a SQLite database - an excellent choice for most - and decide that you need to support a dozen or a hundred concurrent users.