Setup for high volume of database writing
You should actually be okay with low hundreds of writes per minute through SQLAlchemy (thats only a couple a second); if you're talking more like a thousand a minute, yeah that might be problematic.
What kind of data do you have?  If it's fairly flat (few tables, few relations), you might want to investigate a non-relational database such as CouchDB or Mongo.  If you want to use SQL, I strongly reccommend PostgreSQL, it seems to deal with large databases and frequent writes a lot better than MySQL.
It also depends how complex the data is that you're inserting.
I think unfortunately, you're going to just have to try a couple things and run benchmarks, as each situation is different and query optimizers are basically magic.
I am researching a project that would require hundreds of database writes per a minute. I have never dealt with this level of data writes before and I am looking for good scalable techniques and technologies.
I am a comfortable python developer with experience in django and sql alchemy. I am thinking I will build the data interface on django, but I don't think that it is a good idea to go through the orm to do the amount of data writes I will require. I am definitely open to learning new technologies.
The solution will live on Amazon web services, so I have access to all their tools. Ultimately I am looking for advice on database selection, data writing techniques, and any other needs I may have that I do not realize. 
Any advice on where to start?
Thanks,
CG