I'm starting a new application and looking at using an ORM -- in particular, SQLAlchemy. Say I've got a column 'foo' in my database and I want to increment it. In straight sqlite, this is easy: db = sqlite3.connect('mydata.sqlitedb') cur = db.cursor() cur.execute('update table stuff set foo = foo + 1') I figured out the SQLAlchemy SQL-builder equivalent: engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine('sqlite:/