django-fast-update

Faster db updates using UPDATE FROM VALUES sql variants.

Installation & Usage

Run pip install django-fast-update and place fast_update in INSTALLED_APPS.

With attaching FastUpdateManager as a manager to your model, fast_update can be used instead of bulk_update, e.g.:

from django.db import models
from fast_update.query import FastUpdateManager

class MyModel(models.Model):
    objects = FastUpdateManager()
    field_a = ...
    field_b = ...
    field_c = ...

# to update multiple instances at once:
MyModel.objects.fast_update(bunch_of_instances, ['field_a', 'field_b', 'field_c'])

Alternatively fast.fast_update can be used directly with a queryset as first argument (Warning - this skips most sanity checks with up to 30% speed gain, so make sure not to feed something totally off).

Compatibility

fast_update is known to work with these database versions:

• SQLite 3.15+
• PostgreSQL
• MariaDB 10.2+
• MySQL 5.7+

For unsupported database backends or outdated versions fast_update will fall back to bulk_update. (It is possible to register fast update implementations for other db vendors with register_implementation. See fast_update/fast.py for more details.)

Note that with fast_update f-expressions cannot be used anymore. This is a design decision to not penalize update performance by some swiss-army-knife functionality. If you have f-expressions in your update data, consider re-grouping the update steps and update those fields with update or bulk_update instead.

Other than with bulk_update duplicates in a changeset are not allowed and will raise. This is mainly a safety guard to not let slip through duplicates, where the final update state would be undetermined or directly depend on the database's compatibility.

copy_update

This is a PostgreSQL only update implementation based on COPY FROM. This runs even faster than fast_update for medium to big changesets (but tends to be slower than fast_update for <100 objects).

copy_update follows the same interface idea as bulk_update and fast_update, minus a batch_size argument (data is always transferred in one big batch). It can be used likewise from the FastUpdateManager. copy_update also has no support for f-expressions, also duplicates will raise.

Note copy_update will probably never leave the alpha/PoC-state, as psycopg3 brings great COPY support, which does a more secure value conversion and has a very fast C-version.

Note Django 4.2 brings psycopg3 support, which is currently not yet supported by copy_update. While psycopg2 will keep working as before, psycopg3 will raise on attempts to use copy_update until #16 got resolved.

Status

Currently beta, still some TODOs left.

The whole package is tested with Django 3.2 & 4.2 on Python 3.8 & 3.11.

Performance

There is a management command in the example app testing performance of updates on the FieldUpdate model (./manage.py perf).

fast_update is at least 8 times faster than bulk_update, and keeps making ground for bigger changesets. This indicates different runtime complexity. fast_update grows almost linear for very big numbers of rows (tested during some perf series against copy_update up to 10M), while bulk_update grows much faster (looks quadratic to me, which can be lowered to linear by applying a proper batch_size, but it stays very steep compared to fast_update).

For very big changesets copy_update is the clear winner, and even shows a substantial increase in updated rows/s (within my test range, as upper estimate this of course cannot grow slower than linear, as the data pumping will saturate to linear).