Comparing database management systems with SQLAlchemy : A quantitative study on database management systems

Abstract: Knowing which database management system to use for a project is difficult to know in advance. Luckily, there are tools that can help the developer apply the same database design on multiple different database management systems without having to change the code. In this thesis, we investigate the strengths of SQLAlchemy, which is an SQL toolkit for Python. We compared SQLite, PostgreSQL and MySQL using SQLAlchemy as well as compared a pure MySQL implementation against the results from SQLAlchemy. We conclude that, for our database design, PostgreSQL was the best database management system and that for the average SQL-user, SQLAlchemy is an excellent substitution to writing regular SQL.