Before writing this article, I talked to a group of software engineers who use Hibernate on a daily basis in their work. Some of them work for small companies (up to 20 developers on site) while others are employed in corporations known world-wide that employ over 100,000 IT professionals. This gave me an insight into how development with Hibernate is organized in different companies. There are several approaches to creating SQL scripts and Hibernate O/R Mapping classes.

In this article I’m going to show you how to design SQLAlchemy models using Vertabelo, an online tool for visual database design, and our code generator. SQLAlchemy is propably the most advanced and well engineered OR/M for Python, while Vertabelo is a database design tool that works in a web browser. The Vertabelo code generator is an pythonic script called vertabelo-sqlalchemy. As you can see, the script is open source and hosted on GitHub.