[Luminarys]

Yes, in a cooperative async model anything which would block will stop progress of every coroutine, so you would need an async version of the ORM library for this to work. When you await something, you're telling the event loop to stop running this coroutine, and wait for something (usually IO) to happen before resuming execution. Because of this, if you block on IO without using await, the coroutine doesn't know to yield and will simply pause; thus execution of every single coroutine is blocked.

This leads to a sort of infectious need to make everything async as even a single non cooperating coroutine can bring the whole show to a halt. It's essentially the red vs blue function problem of Python. However, there is actually a nice alternative, gevent. gevent will monkey patch all functions in the standard library which would block, e.g. reading from a socket, attaching an implicit await to them. If the author has used gevent, the example Django code would actually work as expected, since the code would execute until the database connection was written to/read from and then immediately await.

Either way, async IO is still a somewhat tricky thing to understand and get right. It took writing a non blocking event loop with epoll in my case to really grok what was going on under the hood of something like asyncio.