Django - limiting query results

Question

I want to take the last 10 instances of a model and have this code:

 Model.objects.all().order_by('-id')[:10]

Is it true that firstly pick up all instances, and then take only 10 last ones? Is there any more effective method?

Answer 1

Django querysets are lazy. That means a query will hit the database only when you specifically ask for the result.

So until you print or actually use the result of a query you can filter further with no database access.

As you can see below your code only executes one sql query to fetch only the last 10 items.

In [19]: import logging                                 
In [20]: l = logging.getLogger('django.db.backends')    
In [21]: l.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)                      
In [22]: l.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())      
In [23]: User.objects.all().order_by('-id')[:10]          
(0.000) SELECT "auth_user"."id", "auth_user"."username", "auth_user"."first_name", "auth_user"."last_name", "auth_user"."email", "auth_user"."password", "auth_user"."is_staff", "auth_user"."is_active", "auth_user"."is_superuser", "auth_user"."last_login", "auth_user"."date_joined" FROM "auth_user" ORDER BY "auth_user"."id" DESC LIMIT 10; args=()
Out[23]: [<User: hamdi>]