Checking for empty queryset in Django

Question

if not orgs:
    # Do this...
else:
    # Do that...

Since version 1.2, Django has QuerySet.exists() method which is the most efficient:

if orgs.exists():
    # Do this...
else:
    # Do that...

But if you are going to evaluate QuerySet anyway it's better to use:

if orgs:
   ...

For more information read QuerySet.exists() documentation.

If you have a huge number of objects, this can (at times) be much faster:

try:
    orgs[0]
    # If you get here, it exists...
except IndexError:
    # Doesn't exist!

On a project I'm working on with a huge database, not orgs is 400+ ms and orgs.count() is 250ms. In my most common use cases (those where there are results), this technique often gets that down to under 20ms. (One case I found, it was 6.)

Could be much longer, of course, depending on how far the database has to look to find a result. Or even faster, if it finds one quickly; YMMV.

EDIT: This will often be slower than orgs.count() if the result isn't found, particularly if the condition you're filtering on is a rare one; as a result, it's particularly useful in view functions where you need to make sure the view exists or throw Http404. (Where, one would hope, people are asking for URLs that exist more often than not.)

To check the emptiness of a queryset:

if orgs.exists():
    # Do something

or you can check for a the first item in a queryset, if it doesn't exist it will return None:

if orgs.first():
    # Do something

The most efficient way (before django 1.2) is this:

if orgs.count() == 0:
    # no results
else:
    # alrigh! let's continue...

I disagree with the predicate

if not orgs:

It should be

if not orgs.count():

I was having the same issue with a fairly large result set (~150k results). The operator is not overloaded in QuerySet, so the result is actually unpacked as a list before the check is made. In my case execution time went down by three orders.