I've found SQLAlchemy to be very nice, actually. It first provides very basic abstractions on top of SQL, things like defining tables/columns and querying without having to mess around with strings.
That alone is most of the usefulness of SQLAlchemy, as it lets you write subqueries and joins extremely easily.
On top of that, the (optional) ORM is built as models on top of SQLAlchemy's table/relationship API. These models can be queried almost exactly like the raw tables.
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I've found SQLAlchemy to be very nice, actually. It first provides very basic abstractions on top of SQL, things like defining tables/columns and querying without having to mess around with strings.
That alone is most of the usefulness of SQLAlchemy, as it lets you write subqueries and joins extremely easily.
On top of that, the (optional) ORM is built as models on top of SQLAlchemy's table/relationship API. These models can be queried almost exactly like the raw tables.