Definitely useful, I'll revisit the slides later when I'm looking at optimizing.

I'm working through some of CPU overhead issues with Django now and wishing occasionally that I had chosen to use Sqlalchemy as my primary database tool. Django seemed like the easier solution at the time because of the steep learning curve of Sqlalchemy. I think it's worth learning, especially now that I've hit some edges in Django's ORM. I suppose it's good to know I can always use a crazy hybrid of the two libraries if needed.