I’ve recently been playing with the django web framework, and although I’ve only just gotten my toes wet (so to speak), I’m really impressed. The persistence component is really fabulous, with it’s transparent multi-database support, you can do your testing using the embedded SQLite3 database, and deploy using MySQL, or PostgreSQL.

The syntax for the data model is clean, and intuitive, and you shouldn’t have to resort to SQL unless you have some really weird requirements, or joins.

Highly recommended.