Best way to do enum in Sqlalchemy?

SQLAlchemy has an Enum type since 0.6: http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/type_basics.html?highlight=enum#sqlalchemy.types.Enum

Although I would only recommend its usage if your database has a native enum type. Otherwise I would personally just use an int.

Python's enumerated types are directly acceptable by the SQLAlchemy Enum type as of SQLAlchemy 1.1:

import enum
from sqlalchemy import Integer, Enum

class MyEnum(enum.Enum):
    one = 1
    two = 2
    three = 3

class MyClass(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'some_table'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    value = Column(Enum(MyEnum))

Note that above, the string values "one", "two", "three" are persisted, not the integer values.

For older versions of SQLAlchemy, I wrote a post which creates its own Enumerated type (http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2011/01/14/the-enum-recipe/)

from sqlalchemy.types import SchemaType, TypeDecorator, Enum
from sqlalchemy import __version__
import re

if __version__ < '0.6.5':
    raise NotImplementedError("Version 0.6.5 or higher of SQLAlchemy is required.")

class EnumSymbol(object):
    """Define a fixed symbol tied to a parent class."""

    def __init__(self, cls_, name, value, description):
        self.cls_ = cls_
        self.name = name
        self.value = value
        self.description = description

    def __reduce__(self):
        """Allow unpickling to return the symbol 
        linked to the DeclEnum class."""
        return getattr, (self.cls_, self.name)

    def __iter__(self):
        return iter([self.value, self.description])

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<%s>" % self.name

class EnumMeta(type):
    """Generate new DeclEnum classes."""

    def __init__(cls, classname, bases, dict_):
        cls._reg = reg = cls._reg.copy()
        for k, v in dict_.items():
            if isinstance(v, tuple):
                sym = reg[v[0]] = EnumSymbol(cls, k, *v)
                setattr(cls, k, sym)
        return type.__init__(cls, classname, bases, dict_)

    def __iter__(cls):
        return iter(cls._reg.values())

class DeclEnum(object):
    """Declarative enumeration."""

    __metaclass__ = EnumMeta
    _reg = {}

    @classmethod
    def from_string(cls, value):
        try:
            return cls._reg[value]
        except KeyError:
            raise ValueError(
                    "Invalid value for %r: %r" % 
                    (cls.__name__, value)
                )

    @classmethod
    def values(cls):
        return cls._reg.keys()

    @classmethod
    def db_type(cls):
        return DeclEnumType(cls)

class DeclEnumType(SchemaType, TypeDecorator):
    def __init__(self, enum):
        self.enum = enum
        self.impl = Enum(
                        *enum.values(), 
                        name="ck%s" % re.sub(
                                    '([A-Z])', 
                                    lambda m:"_" + m.group(1).lower(), 
                                    enum.__name__)
                    )

    def _set_table(self, table, column):
        self.impl._set_table(table, column)

    def copy(self):
        return DeclEnumType(self.enum)

    def process_bind_param(self, value, dialect):
        if value is None:
            return None
        return value.value

    def process_result_value(self, value, dialect):
        if value is None:
            return None
        return self.enum.from_string(value.strip())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
    from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, String, create_engine
    from sqlalchemy.orm import Session

    Base = declarative_base()

    class EmployeeType(DeclEnum):
        part_time = "P", "Part Time"
        full_time = "F", "Full Time"
        contractor = "C", "Contractor"

    class Employee(Base):
        __tablename__ = 'employee'

        id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
        name = Column(String(60), nullable=False)
        type = Column(EmployeeType.db_type())

        def __repr__(self):
             return "Employee(%r, %r)" % (self.name, self.type)

    e = create_engine('sqlite://', echo=True)
    Base.metadata.create_all(e)

    sess = Session(e)

    sess.add_all([
        Employee(name='e1', type=EmployeeType.full_time),
        Employee(name='e2', type=EmployeeType.full_time),
        Employee(name='e3', type=EmployeeType.part_time),
        Employee(name='e4', type=EmployeeType.contractor),
        Employee(name='e5', type=EmployeeType.contractor),
    ])
    sess.commit()

    print sess.query(Employee).filter_by(type=EmployeeType.contractor).all()

I'm not really knowledgeable in SQLAlchemy but this approach by Paulo seemed much simpler to me.
I didn't need user-friendly descriptions, so I went with it.

Quoting Paulo (I hope he doesn't mind my reposting it here):

Python’s namedtuple collection to the rescue. As the name implies, a namedtuple is a tuple with each item having a name. Like an ordinary tuple, the items are immutable. Unlike an ordinary tuple, an item’s value can be accessed through its name using the dot notation.

Here is a utility function for creating a namedtuple:

from collections import namedtuple

def create_named_tuple(*values):
     return namedtuple('NamedTuple', values)(*values)

The * before the values variable is for “unpacking” the items of the list so that each item is passed as an individual argument to the function.

To create a namedtuple, just invoke the above function with the needed values:

>>> project_version = create_named_tuple('alpha', 'beta', 'prod')
NamedTuple(alpha='alpha', beta='beta', prod='prod')

We can now use the project_version namedtuple to specify the values of the version field.

class Project(Base):
     ...
     version = Column(Enum(*project_version._asdict().values(), name='projects_version'))
     ...

This works great for me and is so much simpler than the other solutions that I previously found.