I'm using SqlAlchemy to interact with an existing PostgreSQL database.
I need to access data organized in a many-to-many relationship. The documentation describes how to create relationships, but I cannot find an example for neatly loading and query an existing one.
Querying an existing relation is not really different than creating a new one. You pretty much write the same code but specify the table and column names that are already there, and of course you won't need SQLAlchemy to issue the CREATE TABLE statements.
See http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/05/mappers.html#many-to-many . All you need to do is specify the foreign key columns for your existing parent, child, and association tables as in the example, and specify autoload=True to fill out the other fields on your Tables. If your association table stores additional information, as they almost always do, you should just break your many-to-many relation into two many-to-one relations.
I learned SQLAlchemy while working with MySQL. With that database I always had to specify the foreign key relationships because they weren't explicit database constraints. You might get lucky and be able to reflect even more from your database, but you might prefer to use something like http://pypi.python.org/pypi/sqlautocode to just code the entire database schema and avoid the reflection delay.