Getting COUNT from sqlalchemy

While the other answers work, SQLAlchemy provides a shortcut for scalar queries as ResultProxy.scalar():

count = db.engine.execute('select count(id) from sometable').scalar()

scalar() fetches the first column of the first row and closes the result set, or returns None if no row is present. There's also Query.scalar(), if using the Query API.

what you are asking for called unpacking, ResultProxy is an iterable, so we can do

# there will be single record
record, = db.engine.execute('select count(id) from sometable')
# this record consist of single value
count, = record