Automatically prefetch foreign key values as needed.
When accessing a ForeignKey
or OneToOneField
(including in reverse) on a model instance, if the field’s value has not yet been loaded then auto-prefetch will prefetch the field for all model instances loaded by the same QuerySet
as the current model instance. This is enabled at the model level and totally automatic and transparent for users of the model.
Python 3.9 to 3.13 supported.
Django 4.2 to 5.2 supported.
Install with python -m pip install django-auto-prefetch
.
Change all these imports from django.db.models
to auto_prefetch
:
ForeignKey
Manager
Model
- including inheriting Meta
from auto_prefetch.Model.Meta
OneToOneField
QuerySet
If you use custom subclasses of any of these classes, you should be able to swap for the auto_prefetch
versions in your subclasses’ bases.
For example, if you had:
from django.db import models class Book(models.Model): author = models.ForeignKey("Author", on_delete=models.CASCADE) class Meta: verbose_name = "Book"
…swap to:
import auto_prefetch from django.db import models class Book(auto_prefetch.Model): author = auto_prefetch.ForeignKey("Author", on_delete=models.CASCADE) class Meta(auto_prefetch.Model.Meta): verbose_name = "Book"
Run python manage.py makemigrations
to generate migrations for all the models you modified. These migrations will set the Meta.base_manager_name
option to prefetch_manager
for every model that you’ve converted. This change ensures that auto-prefetching happens on related managers. Such migrations do not change anything in the database.
(If you instead set Meta.base_manager_name
on your models, make sure it inherits from auto_prefetch.Manager
.)
Currently when accessing an uncached foreign key field, Django will automatically fetch the missing value from the database. When this occurs in a loop it creates 1+N query problems. Consider the following snippet:
for choice in Choice.objects.all(): print(choice.question.question_text, ":", choice.choice_text)
This will do one query for the choices and then one query per choice to get that choice’s question.
This behavior can be avoided with correct application of prefetch_related()
like this:
for choice in Choice.objects.prefetch_related("question"): print(choice.question.question_text, ":", choice.choice_text)
This has several usability issues, notably:
prefetch_related()
(e.g. the template) may be quite removed from where the prefetch_related()
needs to be applied (e.g. the view).prefetch_related()
/ select_related()
calls are missing is non-trivial and needs to be done on an ongoing basis.prefetch_related()
calls are even harder to find and result in unnecessary database queries.prefetch_related()
clauses.On the first iteration of the loop in the example above, when we first access a choice’s question field, instead of fetching the question for just that choice, auto-prefetch will speculatively fetch the questions for all the choices returned by the QuerySet
. This change results in the first snippet having the same database behavior as the second while reducing or eliminating all of the noted usability issues.
Some important points:
ManyToManyField
s are not changed at all.ForeignKey
and OneToOneField
s, the generated queries can’t have more result rows than the original query and may have less. This eliminates any concern about a multiplicative query size explosion.prefetch_related()
and/or select_related()
calls.choice.question.author
. The conditions above still hold under such chaining.An example of that last point is:
qs = Choice.objects.all() list(qs)[0].question
Such examples generally seem to be rarer and more likely to be visible during code inspection (vs {{ choice.question }}
in a template). And larger queries are usually a better failure mode than producing hundreds of queries. For this to actually produce inferior behavior in practice you need to: * fetch a large number of choices * filter out basically all of them * ...in a way that prevents garbage collection of the unfiltered ones
If any of those aren’t true then automatic prefetching will still produce equivalent or better database behavior than without.
If you have concerns go look at the code, it’s all in auto_prefetch/__init__.py and is fairly short.
django-auto-prefetch was written by Gordon Wrigley and is maintained by Adam Johnson.
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