I believe that Django ORM can fit almost 95% of the projects, however, it doesn’t perform well for some tasks. You can switch to raw SQL, but again: if you need an additional level of abstraction to build a flexible and better-maintained product, it won’t be enough. Here is when SQLAlchemy Core comes to fill the gap. In this talk, I’d like to cover the following topics: Django ORM, SQLAlchemy ORM, SQLAlchemy Core; when it’s time to consider adding SQLAlchemy Core to the Django application; to highlight integration steps; how to write tests with SQLAlchemy Core; some examples and observations from my personal experience.