An simplified example of my model structure would be
class Corporation(models.Model):
...
class Division(models.Model):
corporation = models.ForeignKey(Corporation)
class Department(models.Model):
division = models.ForeignKey(Division)
type = models.IntegerField()
Now I want to display a table that display corporations where a column will contain the number of departments of a certain type, e.g. type=10. Currently, this is implemented with a helper on the Corporation model that retrieves those, e.g.
class Corporation(models.Model):
...
def get_departments_type_10(self):
return (
Department.objects
.filter(division__corporation=self, type=10)
.count()
)
The problem here is that this absolutely murders performance due to the N+1 problem.
I have tried to approach this problem with select_related, prefetch_related, annotate, and subquery, but I havn't been able to get the results I need.
Ideally, each Corporation in the queryset should be annotated with an integer type_10_count which reflects the number of departments of that type.
I'm sure I could do something with raw sql in .extra(), but the docs announce that it is going to be deprecated (I'm on Django 1.11)
EDIT: Example of raw sql solution
corps = Corporation.objects.raw("""
SELECT
*,
(
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM foo_division div ON div.corporation_id = c.id
JOIN foo_department dept ON dept.division_id = div.id
WHERE dept.type = 10
) as type_10_count
FROM foo_corporation c
""")
I think with Subquery we can get SQL similar to one you have provided, with this code
# Get amount of departments with GROUP BY division__corporation [1]
# .order_by() will remove any ordering so we won't get additional GROUP BY columns [2]
departments = Department.objects.filter(type=10).values(
'division__corporation'
).annotate(count=Count('id')).order_by()
# Attach departments as Subquery to Corporation by Corporation.id.
# Departments are already grouped by division__corporation
# so .values('count') will always return single row with single column - count [3]
departments_subquery = departments.filter(division__corporation=OuterRef('id'))
corporations = Corporation.objects.annotate(
departments_of_type_10=Subquery(
departments_subquery.values('count'), output_field=IntegerField()
)
)
The generated SQL is
SELECT "corporation"."id", ... (other fields) ...,
(
SELECT COUNT("division"."id") AS "count"
FROM "department"
INNER JOIN "division" ON ("department"."division_id" = "division"."id")
WHERE (
"department"."type" = 10 AND
"division"."corporation_id" = ("corporation"."id")
) GROUP BY "division"."corporation_id"
) AS "departments_of_type_10"
FROM "corporation"
Some concerns here is that subquery can be slow with large tables. However, database query optimizers can be smart enough to promote subquery to OUTER JOIN, at least I've heard PostgreSQL does this.