the ORM is built on top of the expression language, and the entire design is that Core expression units are fed into ORM functions that consume them. So there is no separation between a Core SQL construct and the ability to use it in the ORM. In earlier versions there were some limitations here and there moving from Core to ORM as far as how result sets could be constructed, but on the SELECT side all of those are ancient history. My talk at http://www.sqlalchemy.org/library.html#handcodedapplications... is entirely about translating from SQL to the ORM and focuses on a problem that uses a window function.
You're totally right of course. I was to focused on the idea of creating queries based on models and somehow getting models back. Somehow I got caught up in this completely wrong way of thinking about the problem.
I greatly enjoyed watching the talk. You make it obvious what to take away from the talk and your explanations are easy to follow along with. In the first part of the talk, you really took advantage of Python's dynamicity to describe something very static. I hope that's something that will stay in my mind and change how I write code in the future.
