Does acccessing nested FK relation's field value downgrade performance?
I have various models which are interconnected through Foreign key relations, does doing this make any performance downside. I want to know how does django perform this internally.
PriceSheet.objects.select_related('query').filter(id=pricesheet_id).values('query__campaign_name',
'query_id',
'query__campaign_status',
'query__lead_id',
'query__lead__legal_name',
'query__lead__brand_name' # nested
'query__lead__working_capital',
'query__lead__payment_terms',
) # 7
You can inspect the query by printing:
print(queryset.query)
In that case Django will print the query that it will make. In this case, the query will look like:
SELECT query.campaign_name, price_sheet.id, query.campaign_status,
query.lead_id, lead.legal_name, lead.brand_name,
lead.working_capital, lead.payment_terms
FROM price_sheet
LEFT OUTER JOIN query ON query.id = price_sheet.query_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN lead ON lead.id = query.lead_id
WHERE price_sheet.id = pricesheet_id
Django will thus make JOINs on the models referenced by the query and by the lead of the query. Using .select_related(…) [Django-doc] to force a JOIN is not necessary in this case.
Usually it is better not to work with .values(…) [Django-doc] when you want to convert data to a JSON blob, since it erodes the logical layer that the model(s) provide. For a field with choices for example, you can no longer (easily) access the display name, etc.