I mean that from the point of view of YAGNI for a small app. For a big one, absolutely, you will find the places where the theoretical distinctions suddenly turn real. Decoupling your data model from your storage is a real concern and Session on its own won't give you that advantage of a real repository layer.
SQLAlchemy is flexible, though. You can map a Person from three tables if you need to. It's a data mapper, then a separate query builder on top, then a separate ORM on top of that, and then Declarative which ties them all together with an ActiveRecord-ish approach.
> I prefer not to use ORMs but just write queries and map the results into value objects. That work I would put into a Repository.
Yep, I hear ya. Maybe if they'd built on top of something lower-level like stdlib sqlite3, it wouldn't be so tempting to dismiss as YAGNI. I think my comment sounded more dismissive than I really meant.
SQLAlchemy is flexible, though. You can map a Person from three tables if you need to. It's a data mapper, then a separate query builder on top, then a separate ORM on top of that, and then Declarative which ties them all together with an ActiveRecord-ish approach.
> I prefer not to use ORMs but just write queries and map the results into value objects. That work I would put into a Repository.
Yep, I hear ya. Maybe if they'd built on top of something lower-level like stdlib sqlite3, it wouldn't be so tempting to dismiss as YAGNI. I think my comment sounded more dismissive than I really meant.