You can also return Pydantic models (you'll see more about that later).

There are many other objects and models that will be automatically converted to JSON (including ORMs, etc). Try using your favorite ones, it's highly probable that they are already supported.

## Recap { #recap }

* Import `FastAPI`.
* Create an `app` instance.

You could use any other SQL or NoSQL database library you want (in some cases called <abbr title="Object Relational Mapper, a fancy term for a library where some classes represent SQL tables and instances represent rows in those tables">"ORMs"</abbr>), FastAPI doesn't force you to use anything. 😎

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As SQLModel is based on SQLAlchemy, you can easily use **any database supported** by SQLAlchemy (which makes them also supported by SQLModel), like:

    * The new support for ORM mode fixes issues/adds features related to ORMs with lazy-loading, hybrid properties, dynamic/getters (using `@property` decorators) and several other use cases.
    * This applies to ORMs like SQLAlchemy, Peewee, Tortoise ORM, GINO ORM and virtually any other.