IX. FastAPI — Database Patterns: SQLModel & Alembic

Deep dive into building scalable data layers

Hi! So far we have covered almost every key concept, but without a database nothing can be persisted, right? So, today I will walk you through two important Magic Libraries that make the database operations hustle free.

You’ve built endpoints. You’ve added auth. You’ve written tests. But your data lives in a dictionary, or worse — it vanishes when the server restarts.

Time to connect to a real database. And in Python, that means making a choice: raw SQL, SQLAlchemy, or SQLModel? Sync or async? ORM or not?

Let’s cut through the confusion.

SQLModel was created by the same author of FastAPI. It combines:

• Pydantic for validation and serialization
• SQLAlchemy for database operations

One model does both jobs.

Let’s install before getting started

pip install sqlmodel

Basic SQLModel Setup

from sqlmodel import SQLModel, Field…