Dear Everyone, I am trying to sqlalchemy to correctly map my data. Note that a unified group is basically a group of groups. (One unifiedGroup maps to many groups but each group can only map to one ug). So basically this is the definition of my unifiedGroups: CREATE TABLE `unifiedGroups` ( `ugID` INT AUTO_INCREMENT, `gID` INT NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY(`ugID`, `gID`), KEY( `gID`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 ; Note that each row is a ugID, gID tuple. ( I do not know before hand how many gID is per ugID so this is probably the most sensible and simplest method). Definition for my UnifiedGroup class class UnifiedGroup(object): """UnifiedProduct behaves very much like a group """ def __init__(self, ugID): self.ugID=ugID #Added by mapping self.groups=False def __str__(self): return '<%s:%s>' % (self.ugID, ','.join( [g for g in self.groups])) These are my mapping tables: tb_groupsInfo = Table( 'groupsInfo', metadata, Column('gID', Integer, primary_key=True), Column('gName', String(128)), ) tb_unifiedGroups = Table( 'unifiedGroups', metadata, Column('ugID', Integer, primary_key=True), Column('gID', Integer, ForeignKey('groupsInfo.gID')), ) My mapper maps in the following manner: mapper( UnifiedGroup, tb_unifiedGroups, properties={ 'groups': relation( Group, backref='unifiedGroup') }) However, when I tried to do groupInstance.unifiedGroup, I am getting an empty list [], while groupInstance.unifiedGroup.groups returns me an error: AttributeError: 'InstrumentedList' object has no attribute 'groups' Traceback (most recent call last): File "Mapping.py", line 119, in <module> print p.group.unifiedGroup.groups AttributeError: 'InstrumentedList' object has no attribute 'groups' What is wrong?