slight correction: it is of course possible to use gevent with a database driver without monkeypatching, as I wrote my own gevent benchmarks using psycogreen.  I think what I'm getting at is that it's a good thing if async DBAPIs could target asyncio explicitly rather than having to write different gevent/eventlet specific things, and that tools like SQLAlchemy can allow for greenlet style coding against those DBAPIs without one having to install/run the whole gevent event loop.   Basically I like the greenlet style of coding but I would be excited to skip the gevent part, never do any monkeypatching again, and also have other parts of the app doing asyncio work with other kinds of services.     this is about interoperability.