I'm having a difficult time figuring out why a simple SELECT query is taking such a long time with sqlalchemy using raw SQL (I'm getting 14600 rows/sec, but when running the same query through psycopg2 without sqlalchemy, I'm getting 38421 rows/sec).

After some poking around, I realized that toggling sqlalchemy's use_native_unicode parameter in the create_engine call actually makes a huge difference.

This query takes 0.5secs to retrieve 7300 rows:

from sqlalchemy import create_engine

engine = create_engine("postgresql+psycopg2://localhost...",
                       use_native_unicode=True)
r = engine.execute("SELECT * FROM logtable")
fetched_results = r.fetchall()

This query takes 0.19secs to retrieve the same 7300 rows:

engine = create_engine("postgresql+psycopg2://localhost...",
                       use_native_unicode=False)
r = engine.execute("SELECT * FROM logtable")
fetched_results = r.fetchall()

The only difference between the 2 queries is use_native_unicode. But sqlalchemy's own docs state that it is better to keep use_native_unicode=True (http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/dialects/postgresql.html).

Does anyone know why use_native_unicode is making such a big performance difference? And what are the ramifications of turning off use_native_unicode?