Printing django ORM queries

06 January 2025 - #tech

Most of the time I find djangos ORM system very useful: It provides an easy abstraction for building queries quickly. Especially if those queries involve reverse lookups or many-to-many relationships.

But as with most abstractions, building the initial implementation is easy, but making changes without understanding the inner workings can be tricky.

Turns out complex queries can be debugged using the .query property of the queryset.

The query attribute is an opaque object. It represents the internals of the query construction and is not part of the public API.¹

# 1. Define class in library.models
class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    published_date = models.DateField()
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=5, decimal_places=2)`

# 2. Create a queryset
from library.models import Book
from datetime import date
queryset = Book.objects.filter(published_date__gt=date(2020, 1, 1))

# 3. Print the query
print(queryset.query)

This yields the following SQL output:

SELECT "library_book"."id", "library_book"."title", "library_book"."author", "library_book"."published_date", "library_book"."price"
FROM "library_book"
WHERE "library_book"."published_date" > '2020-01-01'

From django documentation on pickling querysets ↩

Printing django ORM queries

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