Driven by the immense popularity of asynchronous frameworks, such as FastAPI, asynchronous database support suddenly became a hot topic in the Python community. As talking to your database often forms a significant portion of the input and output of your application, it's important to do that asynchronously as well. With the release of version 1.4, SQLAlchemy added support for Asynchronous I/O for both its core and ORM features. This means that you can now use the popular SQL toolkit for Python in your asynchronous applications.

In my talk, I will introduce you to the newly added support for asyncio in SQLAlchemy. I will go over how easy it is to set up the new AsyncEngine, point you to some of the differences with synchronous SQLAlchemy, and show you some of the pitfalls to avoid. In addition, I will also show you how you can run your existing synchronous SQLAlchemy code asynchronously to help you transition to a fully asynchronous application. By the end of my talk, you should know enough to start your own asynchronous SQLAlchemy adventure.