SQLModel is a library for interacting with SQL databases from Python code, with Python objects. It is designed to be intuitive, easy to use, highly compatible, and robust.
SQLModel is based on Python type annotations, and powered by Pydantic and SQLAlchemy.
The key features are:
Intuitive to write: Great editor support. Completion everywhere. Less time debugging. Designed to be easy to use and learn. Less time reading docs.
Easy to use: It has sensible defaults and does a lot of work underneath to simplify the code you write.
Compatible: It is designed to be compatible with FastAPI, Pydantic, and SQLAlchemy.
Extensible: You have all the power of SQLAlchemy and Pydantic underneath.
Short: Minimize code duplication. A single type annotation does a lot of work. No need to duplicate models in SQLAlchemy and Pydantic.
SQLModel is designed to simplify interacting with SQL databases in FastAPI applications, it was created by the same author. 😁
It combines SQLAlchemy and Pydantic and tries to simplify the code you write as much as possible, allowing you to reduce the code duplication to a minimum, but while getting the best developer experience possible.
SQLModel is, in fact, a thin layer on top of Pydantic and SQLAlchemy, carefully designed to be compatible with both.
This way, you can use conventional Python code with classes and instances that represent tables and rows, and that way communicate with the SQL database.
You can learn a lot more about SQLModel by quickly following the tutorial, but if you need a taste right now of how to put all that together and save to the database, you can do this:
But at the same time, ✨ it is a SQLAlchemy model ✨. So, you can combine it and use it with other SQLAlchemy models, or you could easily migrate applications with SQLAlchemy to SQLModel.
And at the same time, ✨ it is also a Pydantic model ✨. You can use inheritance with it to define all your data models while avoiding code duplication. That makes it very easy to use with FastAPI.