I'm using an SQLite database from python (with SQLAlchemy). For performance reasons, I'd like to populate an in-memory database in the application, and then back up that database to disk.

SQLite has a backup API, which seems would do this transparently.

The APSW documentation says that it wraps the backup API, but I'd like to access this functionality from Python's standard sqlite3 module, or in the best case from SQLAlchemy. Is this possible?

the APSW dialect can be added to SQLAlchemy pretty easily as well. It would be very easy to achieve in 0.6, which allows multiple kinds of DBAPI adapters to make use of a common dialect for the database in use.