 <p>Short answer: <strong>You cannot</strong>: AFAIK, currently there is no way to do it from <code>sqlalchemy</code> directly.</p> <p>Howerever, you can use <a href="http://readthedocs.org/docs/sqlalchemy-migrate/en/v0.7.2/versioning.html#modifying-existing-tables" rel="nofollow">sqlalchemy-migrate</a> for this if you change your model frequently and have different versions rolled out to production. Else it might be an overkill and you may be better off generating the <code>ALTER TABLE ...</code> scripts manually.</p>