Neat extension hack of iPython by Catherine Devlin:
RDBMS access via IPython
Introduces a %sql (or %%sql) magic.
Connect to a database, using SQLAlchemy connect strings, then issue SQL commands within IPython or IPython Notebook.
Granted there’s a lot of magic going on, but this speaks to another great feature of iPython, the ability to build up and embed domain specific languages within a nice interactive environment. Knock on effects easily follow, such as rapidly stuffing SQL query results into pandas for data analytics.