Reducing Django Database Queries

There are dozens of ways to optimize your database queries with the Django ORM. As usual, the Django documentation is great and has a good list of them. Here’s some quick tips for query optimization:

1) iterator()

If you are accessing the queryset only once. So for example you can use this as,

traffic = Traffic.objects.all()

for t in traffic.iterator():
    ...
    ...

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2) db_index=True

While defining fields of your models. As the Django documentation says,

This is a number one priority, after you have determined from
profiling what indexes should be added. Use Field.db_index or
Meta.index_together to add these from Django. Consider adding indexes
to fields that you frequently query using filter(), exclude(),
order_by(), etc. as indexes may help to speed up lookups.

Hence you can modify your model as,

class Traffic(Timestamp):
    sessions = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True, db_index=True)
    new_users = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True, db_index=True)
    reminder = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True, db_index=True)
    campaigns = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True, db_index=True)
    new_sales = models.IntegerField(blank=True, null=True, db_index=True)

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3) prefetch_related() or select_related()

If you have relations within your models, using prefetch_related or select_related would be a choice. As per the Django documentation,

select_related works by creating a SQL join and including the fields of the related object in the SELECT statement. For this reason, select_related gets the related objects in the same database query. However, to avoid the much larger result set that would result from joining across a ‘many’ relationship, select_related is limited to single-valued relationships – foreign key and one-to-one.

prefetch_related, on the other hand, does a separate lookup for each
relationship, and does the ‘joining’ in Python. This allows it to prefetch
many-to-many and many-to-one objects, which cannot be done using
select_related, in addition to the foreign key and one-to-one relationships that are supported by select_related.

select_related does a join, prefetch_related does two separate queries. Using these you can make your queries upto 30% faster.

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4) Django Pagination

If your template design allows you to display results in multiple pages your can use Pagination.

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5) Querysets are Lazy

You also need to understand that the Django Querysets are lazy which means that it won’t query the database untill its being used/evaluated. A queryset in Django represents a number of rows in the database, optionally filtered by a query. For example,

traffic = Traffic.objects.all()

The above code doesn’t run any database queries. You can can take the traffic queryset and apply additional filters, or pass it to a function, and nothing will be sent to the database. This is good, because querying the database is one of the things that significantly slows down web applications. To fetch the data from the database, you need to iterate over the queryset:

for t in traffic.iterator():
    print(t.sessions)

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6) django-debug-toolbar

Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel’s content. This includes:

• Request timer
• SQL queries including time to execute and links to EXPLAIN each query

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Modifying your code: (remember Querysets are Lazy)

traffic = Traffic.objects.all()
totals = traffic.aggregate(Sum('sessions'), Sum('new_users'), Sum('reminder'), Sum('campaigns'), Sum('new_sales'), Sum('sales_renewals'))
total_sessions = totals.get('sessions__sum')
total_new_users = totals.get('new_users__sum')
total_reminder = totals.get('reminder__sum')
total_campaigns = totals.get('campaigns__sum')
total_new_sales = totals.get('new_sales__sum')
total_sales_renewals = totals.get('sales_renewals__sum')

t_2014 = traffic.filter(created__year='2014')
t_sessions_2014_wd2 = t_2014.filter(created__week_day=2).aggregate(Sum('sessions'))
...
...

For Call #1 in template (for loop to display table of all results):

{% for t in traffic.iterator %}
    {{ t.sessions }}
    ...
    ...
{% endfor %}