DeeBase — An Async, Fastlite-Inspired ORM

An ergonomic async database library that works across SQLite and PostgreSQL.

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DeeBase is a small async SQLAlchemy-based library with a fastlite-inspired API: dataclass tables, FK navigation, FTS, views, migrations, and a FastAPI integration that auto-generates CRUD endpoints.
Published

January 20, 2026

DeeBase is an async SQLAlchemy-based database library with a fastlite-inspired API that makes async database operations simple across multiple backends.

It’s the ORM that powers CricsDB, and it’s also listed on the collections page.

Example

from dataclasses import dataclass
from datetime import datetime
from deebase import Database, ForeignKey, Text

@dataclass
class User:
    id: int
    name: str
    email: str
    status: str = "active"

@dataclass
class Post:
    id: int
    author_id: ForeignKey[int, "user"]
    title: str
    content: Text
    created_at: datetime

db = Database("sqlite+aiosqlite:///blog.db")
users = await db.create(User, pk='id')
posts = await db.create(Post, pk='id')

alice = await users.insert(User(id=None, name="Alice", email="alice@example.com"))
post = await posts.insert(Post(
    id=None, author_id=alice.id, title="Hello",
    content="First post!", created_at=datetime.now()
))

# FK navigation
author = await posts.fk.author_id(post)
print(author.name)  # "Alice"

# Query
all_posts = await posts()
post = await posts[1]

Features

  • Async/await first — built on SQLAlchemy 2.0+ with aiosqlite and asyncpg drivers
  • Ergonomic API — await users[1], await users(), await users.lookup(email="...")
  • Type safety — optional @dataclass support with IDE autocomplete; or start with plain classes and call .dataclass() later
  • Rich type system — str, Text, int, float, bool, bytes, dict (JSON), datetime, date, time, Optional[T]
  • Foreign keys and defaults — ForeignKey[int, "user"] type annotation; SQL defaults from class field defaults
  • FK navigation — await posts.fk.author_id(post) to fetch parent; await users.get_children(user, "post", "author_id") for children
  • Indexes — simple, composite, unique, and named indexes via Index or create_index()
  • Full-text search — BM25-ranked search via SQLite FTS5 and PostgreSQL pg_textsearch with automatic index sync
  • Views — db.create_view() for JOINs and CTEs with full query API
  • xtra() filtering — create scoped table views that auto-apply filters on all operations including inserts
  • Transactions — atomic multi-operation commits with rollback
  • Database reflection — await db.reflect() to work with existing databases; access tables via db.t.tablename
  • Code generation — create_mod_from_tables() exports schemas as Python dataclasses
  • CLI — deebase init, deebase table create, deebase migrate, deebase sql, deebase data, and more
  • Migrations — schema migrations with up/down support and version tracking
  • FastAPI integration — create_crud_router() auto-generates CRUD endpoints with Swagger docs and FK validation
  • Admin interface — Django-like admin UI at /admin/ via deebase api serve --admin
  • Validation layer — shared validation for CLI, admin, and API