Taming the beast that is the Django ORM - An introduction

The material this blog post was originally developed from was a bunch of slides used for a skill share presentation I gave at my workplace @ coreplan.io.

I have 3+ years of experience with Django, with it being the main framework that underpins the backend of CorePlan’s main SaaS product. It is a mature, batteries included framework that has been around for a while now. One particular powerful yet dangerous feature of Django is the ORM. This is a Django specific ORM which cannot be separated from the rest of the framework. The other major python ORM is SQLAlchemy which can be used with other python web frameworks, but is an independent tool.

Below are some of the things that I have learned about the Django ORM, how it compares to raw SQL and gotchas that you should be aware of when using it.

Thanks for reading! I hope this has been useful to you. There are definitely more particularities and gotchas to be aware of when using the Django ORM and Django in general but I think these are the most common ones.

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