> I'm not familiar with SQLAlchemy, so I find your example equally hard to read, compounded by there being much more code to spelunk through to understand. If

> I'm not familiar with SQLAlchemy, so I find your example equally hard to read, compounded by there being much more code to spelunk through to understand. If you remove few column definition and setup code, it actually boils down to just: class Article(ArticleColumns): @property def users(self) return self.collaborations.join("user").with_entities(User) class User(UserColumns): pass class Collaboration(CollaborationColumns): user = relationship("User", backref="collaborations") article = relationship("Article", backref=backref("collaborations", lazy="dynamic")) @hybrid_property def editorial(self): return self.role == 'editor' In which you can now do some_article.users.filter(Collaboration.editorial) which generates similar SQL query as #merge.