Surface CDMS was developed in Django. The application database will have a migrations table with details of all of the migrations in the Django code base.
In this case, it may make sense to continue to use the Django ORM instead of SQLAlchemy since the Surface CDMS will continue to use Django for sometime.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45595750/use-django-orm-outside-of-django/65985653#65985653