You might be interested in checking out Ibis (https://ibis-project.org/). It provides a dataframe-like API, abstracting over many common execution engines (duckdb, postgres, bigquery, spark, ...). Ibis wrapping duckdb has pretty much replaced pandas as my tool of choice for local data analysis. All the performance of duckdb with all the ergonomics of a dataframe API. (disclaimer: I contribute to Ibis for work).
sql alchemy is an orm, where ibis looks to be a dataframe api that is sort of a dsl over sql. It doesn't try to map relational domains to an object oriented paradigm like sql alchemy does
