Introduction

Django is a robust framework, it is used by companies like Disqus, Instagram, Pinterest, Bitbucket, etc.

Let's have a quick look at some of the things that can scale your application easily and help you improve performance.

Tip #1

• Using class property decorator @property to store the dynamically calculated values for a model, instead of storing it in a column. Using property, you do not have to call the model method using ():

class User(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    ...

    @property
    def full_name(self):
        return f"{first_name} {last_name}"

user = User.objects.first()
print(user.full_name) # This will work perfectly

Tip #2

• Use @cached_property instead of just @property decorator for Model methods to cache the dynamically calculated value in memory. You have to import it first:

from django.utils.functional import cached_property

class User(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    ...

    @cached_property
    def full_name(self):
        # The returned value will be cached
        return f"{first_name} {last_name}"

user = User.objects.first()
print(user.full_name) # This will work perfectly

Tip #3

• Use Q objects for AND, OR & NOT SQL queries:

from django.db.models import Q

# For OR conditions
queryset = User.objects.filter(
    Q(first_name__startswith='G') | Q(last_name__startswith='S')
)

# For AND conditions
queryset = User.objects.filter(
    Q(first_name__startswith='G') & Q(last_name__startswith='S')
)

# For NOT Queries
queryset = User.objects.filter(~Q(first_name='Gaurav'))

Tip #4

• Use select_related, prefetch_related for SQL join operations instead of running multiple queries to get data from related tables.

  So basically, whenever you try to access the foreign key values from a table to another table, Django will perform those queries smartly in an efficient way.

  select_related is used with ForeignKey & OneToOneField field values, on the other hand, prefetch_related is used with ManyToManyField in Django.

  There is simple psychology behind these two ORM methods, Retrieve everything at once if you know you will need it.

Tip #5

• Use bulk_create, bulk_update for the creation and updation of many rows at once.

  When you run an SQL query, it opens a Database connection, and Opening a database connection is an expensive operation. You have to open up network sessions, authenticate, have authorization checked, and so on.

  So if you have hundreds/thousands of records to store in Database, do not use for loop with ORM to perform the creation & Delivery operation.

  Instead we have bulk operations in Django ORM with bulk_create and bulk_update.

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