Hi.  I just started checking out SQLAlchemy and it looks pretty neat.
I like the idea of a clean OO interface that builds SQL under the
hood.

What I'm particularly hoping is that SQLAlchemy might be helpful for
something I often want to do that's painful when writing SQL queries
by hand.  What I often want is to get query results where different
columns aggregate along different dimensions.  So, just to make up an
example, let's say I have a table with columns Firstname, Lastname,
and Income.  What I'd like is to get query results where the columns
are Firstname, Lastname, Income, "sum of incomes of everyone with this
Firstname", "sum of incomces of everyone with this Lastname".

I'm using SQL to store some research data, and I like to be able to
browse the data interactively.  This is painful using direct SQL
queries.  The sticking point with situations like the above is that I
want one column to sum grouping by Firstname, and another column to
sum grouping by Lastname, and I want to do these sums without
collapsing their associated groups..  I'm a relative novice with SQL,
but as far as I know this requires joining the table to itself and
querying the different groupings separately from the two versions.
This quickly becomes unwieldly when I have more than two aggregate
columns, because if I want N different aggregate dimensions, I have to
join the table to itself N times.

Does SQLAlchemy have the smarts to allow me to somehow specify "group
by" information on a per-column basis, and then under the hood
generate the joins necessary to retrieve the aggregates I want?  If
so, how can I do this?  Or even if I had to write the joins, but could
do so in some more compact way than is possible in raw SQL.  Anything
that's simpler than manually writing out all the joins would be an
improvement over what I'm doing now.

Thanks.

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