[orf]

I’m not sure that position lives up to reality. It’s easy to avoid N+1 queries in Django, there are lots of ways to reduce that to 1 joined query or 2 in the case of a m2m. The issue here isn’t that “orms are bad”, the issue here is that “knowing how data flows through your system is hard”.

You’d have exactly the same issue as you’d have if you’d call “get_author_publications” O(n) times in some nested call stack. Except getting out of it wouldn’t be as easy as calling “select_related(…)” - you’d instead just end up re-inventing an ORM.

[cnity]

> Except getting out of it wouldn’t be as easy as calling “select_related(…)” - you’d instead just end up re-inventing an ORM.

This could be where we differ. I wouldn't propose that at all, I'd propose writing a query more appropriate for whatever part of the code contains the iteration.

[orf]

> I'd propose writing a query more appropriate for whatever part of the code contains the iteration.

This is an identical solution to adding “select_related()” in the right places, and thus we loop back to the start of our thread.