The most stupid issues with "active record" type ORMs is the implicit queries on member access, especially in collections - leading to the N queries problem. Bu

The most stupid issues with "active record" type ORMs is the implicit queries on member access, especially in collections - leading to the N queries problem. But in SQLAlchemy one can actually turn that off - that is, make it throw an exception when undeclared table dependencies are attempted to be accessed. This restores sanity. And one gets to keep goodies you mention, plus Alembic migrations (mentioned by another). Also one can write direct SQL too with SQLAlchemy, or use the "core" layer to keep a DSL but avoid ORM.