[goostavos]

This might be a "LMGTFY" type question, but having never used SQLAlchemy, what sets is apart from something like Hibernate?

[storborg]

It's very similar to a "Hibernate for Python", and I believe it started out that way. However, it has since surpassed Hibernate in capabilities, and presents elegant APIs that cover a more substantial fraction of "things you'd want to do in SQL".