Yeah, FastAPI uses SQLAlchemy under it. Along with pydantic to define schemas with typing. And then just started tinkering with orjson for the json serialization. Seems to be the fastest library at the moment.

I have also been experimenting with encode/databases for async DB access. It still uses the SA core functions, which is nice, but that means it does not do the nice relationships stuff that SA has built in when using it to handle everything. At least not that I have found. However it does allow for things like gets without relationships, updates of single records, and stuff like that quite nicely.