Well you're not wrong per se, sqlalchemy is primarily an ORM system. However one of its components is a module purely for sql generation, which you could (not s

Well you're not wrong per se, sqlalchemy is primarily an ORM system. However one of its components is a module purely for sql generation, which you could (not saying you should) use to generate (complex) sql queries. Obviously their main concern is querying and updating rows, but I think pretty much all common sql constructs are supported (and if not it is fairly easy to add your own). I can't say that I ever had to implement an EM algorithm that way though, so I can't say how complicated that would be. Certainly it'll take some more effort than writing it in a familiar SQL dialect. The main reason to do it would be that sqlalchemy has pretty good support for quite a lot of databases.