For Postgres there's Momoko http://momoko.61924.nl/ which is really quite nice. If you're using MySQL you have a few options including patching MySQLdb as explained by chartio (http://chart.io/blog/2011/06/10/making-mysql-queries-asynchr...). I followed the chartio approach and added in some async cursors to fit in better with the tornado database module. Pretty straightforward stuff.