Django 4.1 Asynchronous ORM interface

• https://github.com/django/django/pull/14843

Does this feature use native async drivers ?

• https://github.com/django/django/pull/14843#issuecomment-915603266

No - getting to that point will be a lot of work.

This is the first phase, where we outline the asynchronous API and mostly make it work via threadpools.

The plan is to progressively work down the stack towards native drivers, but that’ll probably take quite a while.

Asynchronous ORM interface

• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/4.1/#asynchronous-orm-interface

QuerySet now provides an asynchronous interface for all data access operations.

These are named as-per the existing synchronous operations but with an a prefix, for example acreate(), aget(), and so on.

The new interface allows you to write asynchronous code without needing to wrap ORM operations in sync_to_async():

async for author in Author.objects.filter(name__startswith="A"):
    book = await author.books.afirst()

Note that, at this stage, the underlying database operations remain synchronous, with contributions ongoing to push asynchronous support down into the SQL compiler, and integrate asynchronous database drivers.

The new asynchronous queryset interface currently encapsulates the necessary sync_to_async() operations for you, and will allow your code to take advantage of developments in the ORM’s asynchronous support as it evolves.

See Asynchronous queries for details and limitations.

django-adds-async-compatible-interface-to-queryset

• https://djangocentral.com/django-adds-async-compatible-interface-to-queryset/

The much-awaited pull request for an async-compatible interface to Queryset just got merged into the main branch of Django.

Pull Request - https://github.com/django/django/pull/14843

The Django core team has been progressively adding async support to the framework. Asynchronous views and middlewares were part of the Django 3.1 release and with the latest changes now Django ORM will be able to run async ORM queries with some exceptions.

With the upcoming release of Django you no longer have to wrap queries in sync_to_async as such:

results = await sync_to_async(Blog.objects.get, thread_sensitive=True)(pk=123)

Now you can write async queries like this:

results = await Blog.objects.aget(pk=123)

Note

Note that, at this stage, the underlying database operations remain synchronous, with contributions ongoing to push asynchronous support down into the SQL compiler, and integrate asynchronous database drivers.

The new asynchronous queryset interface currently encapsulates the necessary sync_to_async() operations for you, and will allow your code to take advantage of developments in the ORM’s asynchronous support as it evolves.

Django 4.1 is expected to release in August 2022, the release notes [ UNDER DEVELOPMENT ] can be found here - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/4.1/

Not so long ago a discussion on the naming convention for async variants took place on the official Django forum where the core members voted in favour of variants with “a” prefix.

In the same PR, Andrew mentioned that it will take a while before we can use async compatible drivers such as Psycopg3

Nevertheless it’s still a big win for the Django community. The ORM is undoubtedly one of the most complex parts of Django and now it is capable of running async queries with the new QuerySet APIs without any major breaking backwards-incompatible changes !

Finally a big thanks to Andrew, Mariusz, Adam, Carlton and all the contributors of Django for the awesome work they have been doing for Django.