tl;dr; Let’s mock the sqlalchemy calls and look at the generated SQL statements.
I’ve read a couple of articles about testing when sqlalchemy is involved. None of them really did unit testing: they all ended up doing local integration tests by spinning up a DB of some sort. While that can work pretty well in many many use cases (in-memory sqlite!), it can also be a PITA when you need to start a docker container, wait for it to boot, install plugins (moddatetime, pgtrimt, unaccent, …), instantiate the models, insert the data, and finally run the tests. While these integration tests have their value, in such slower setup there are benefits to constrain them to the bare minimum instead of being the default way of testing.
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