Should I create mapper objects or use the declarative syntax in SQLAlchemy?

Question

There are two (three, but I\'m not counting Elixir, as its not \"official\") ways to define a persisting object with SQLAlchemy:

Explicit syntax for mapper objects

Answer 1

as of current (2019), many years later, sqlalchemy v1.3 allows a hybrid approach with the best of both worlds

https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/orm/extensions/declarative/table_config.html#using-a-hybrid-approach-with-table

metadata = MetaData()

users_table = Table('users', metadata,
  Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
  Column('name', String),
)

# possibly in a different file/place the orm-declaration
Base = declarative_base(metadata)

class User(Base):
  __table__ = Base.metadata.tables['users']
  def __str__(): 
    return "" % (self.name)