sqlalchemy-postgres

<essential_principles>

SQLAlchemy 2.0 + Pydantic + PostgreSQL Best Practices

This skill provides expert guidance for building production-ready database layers.

Stack

• SQLAlchemy 2.0 with async support (asyncpg driver)
• Pydantic v2 for validation and serialization
• Alembic for migrations
• PostgreSQL only

Core Principles

1. Separation of Concerns

models/       # SQLAlchemy ORM models (database layer)
schemas/      # Pydantic schemas (API layer)
repositories/ # Data access patterns
services/     # Business logic

2. Type Safety First Always use SQLAlchemy 2.0 style with Mapped[] type annotations:

from sqlalchemy.orm import Mapped, mapped_column

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = "users"
    id: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(primary_key=True)
    name: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(String(100))

3. Async by Default Use async engine and sessions for FastAPI:

from sqlalchemy.ext.asyncio import create_async_engine, AsyncSession
engine = create_async_engine("postgresql+asyncpg://...")

4. Pydantic-SQLAlchemy Bridge Keep models and schemas separate but mappable:

# Schema reads from ORM
class UserRead(BaseModel):
    model_config = ConfigDict(from_attributes=True)

5. Repository Pattern Abstract database operations for testability and clean code. </essential_principles>

1. Setup database layer - Initialize SQLAlchemy + Pydantic + Alembic from scratch
2. Define models - Create SQLAlchemy models with Pydantic schemas
3. Create migration - Generate and manage Alembic migrations
4. Query patterns - Async CRUD, joins, eager loading, optimization
5. Full implementation - Complete database layer for a feature