I'm a big fan of SQLAlchemy. While not without its quirks, it lets you write relational-style queries, but in native Python, and automatically maps the result s

I'm a big fan of SQLAlchemy. While not without its quirks, it lets you write relational-style queries, but in native Python, and automatically maps the result sets to objects. If you have N+1 issues with SQLAlchemy, you probably would have had them with your own custom-written SQL queries also.