+1 In January it will be 3 years since first SQLA 2 stable version was released. Plenty of time for all the libraries we use to support it. And they all do - demonstrated by the green build.
Internally we have no specific ties with SQLA1. So the only real - potential - issue is if someone uses SQLA2 in their code for DAGs. Also people are not supposed to use our SQLA Models for anything any more - just APIs. But - with the task isolation efforts - assuming we manage to complete it with 3.2 - what will happen that those users will actually use task SDK - which will have - by necessity - NO SQLA as dependency. At all. The only potential dependency to SQLA is small part of DBApi (coomon.sql) that has some sql-specific (but effectively optional) methods. And we could revert our test setup to test those with SQLA1 to only keep compatibility there. That would be possible and not very difficult. Currently we have separate sqla1 tests to run all tests but we could limit it to only common.sql tests. I don't see personally big issue with this one. But maybe others - especially Airflow users currently who did some migrations might also chime in. J. On Thu, Dec 25, 2025, 20:01 Dev iL <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Community, > > I’d like to start a discussion regarding a proposal to *migrate Airflow to > SQLAlchemy 2.0* for the upcoming *v3.2* feature release. > The Problem: Maintenance Overhead and Locked Ecosystem > > As many of you know, there is a massive ongoing effort by community members > to improve and upgrade type hints across the entire codebase. However, > because our CI currently runs on SQLAlchemy 1.4, *Mypy does not "protect" > us* against introducing new violations that would be caught in a 2.0 > environment. This creates a significant maintenance burden where > contributors and reviewers must manually account for type safety that the > CI is unable to enforce. Moving to 2.0 provides native PEP 484 support, > which will drastically improve ORM class coverage and allow us to catch > bugs during development rather than at runtime. > > Staying on 1.4 has created a "dependency ceiling." Migrating to SQLAlchemy > 2.0 will finally allow us to upgrade several key libraries that the > community has been asking for, including: > > - > > *pandas* >= 2.2 (released on Jan 2024) > - > > *numpy* >= 2 (released on Jun 2024) > - > > *flask-sqlalchemy* >= 3.1 (released on Sep 2023) > - > > *sqlmodel* >= 0.12 (released on Nov 2023) > > Current Progress > > We already have a functional path forward. There is an outstanding PR that > implements this transition: > > - > > *PR:* https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/59218 > > *Note:* This PR is currently *green* (passing all CI checks), demonstrating > that the core functional changes are stable and do not break our existing > test suite. > Seeking Community Feedback > > We want to ensure this transition is as smooth as possible for all > stakeholders. We are particularly interested in your views on: > > 1. > > *Custom Providers/Plugins:* Are there concerns regarding plugins that > rely heavily on SQLAlchemy 1.4 internals? > 2. > > *Database Backends:* Does anyone foresee specific issues with our > supported versions of Postgres, MySQL, or SQLite during this jump? > 3. > > *General Timeline:* Does the community feel Airflow 3.2 is the right > target for this breaking internal change? Should we aim for official > dual > support for a period of time? > > Please share your thoughts, concerns, or support for this move. If there is > a general consensus, we plan to proceed with the review and merge of the PR > in the near future. > > Best regards, > > Dev-iL >
