I don't usually blog about releases, especially point releases, but this one is pretty significant in that we've repaired some very severe speed bumps that were impacting the flush() process. Anyone working with large numbers of objects that has observed the Session to slow down as it gets bigger should download this release, as that issue has been resolved. Other latencies within flush() have also been flattened, and a few spreadsheet jobs that I run here which were taking 20-30 minutes now complete in about five.
It's still not nearly as fast as running a single huge executemany() to insert lots of rows, but if your experience with this release is like mine you should see much faster runs for large data update operations. As usual there's dozens of other fixes and enhancements too.
Work on the 0.6 series continues, as this release is focused on expanding the world of compatibility for SQLAlchemy, including compatibility with Python 3K, Jython, and many more DBAPI implementations. It also refactors DDL generation to work within the same compiler framework as that of non-DDL expressions, so you can easily create and execute CreateTable kinds of objects. Database reflection has been greatly enhanced with a new Inspector API too.