Django Serializer Nested Creation: How to avoid N+1 queries on relations

Question

There are dozens of posts about n+1 queries in nested relations in Django, but I can't seem to find the answer to my question. Here's the context:

The Models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)

class Tag(models.Model):
    book = models.ForeignKey('app.Book', on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='tags')
    category = models.ForeignKey('app.TagCategory', on_delete=models.PROTECT)
    page = models.PositiveIntegerField()

class TagCategory(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    key = models.CharField(max_length=255)

A book has many tags, each tag belongs to a tag category.

The Serializers

class TagSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Tag
        exclude = ['id', 'book']

class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    tags = TagSerializer(many=True, required=False)

    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ['title', 'tags']

    def create(self, validated_data):
        with transaction.atomic():
            tags = validated_data.pop('tags')
            book = Book.objects.create(**validated_data)
            Tag.objects.bulk_create([Tag(book=book, **tag) for tag in tags])
        return book

The Problem

I am trying to POST to the BookViewSet with the following example data:

{ 
  "title": "The Jungle Book"
  "tags": [
    { "page": 1, "category": 36 }, // plot intro
    { "page": 2, "category": 37 }, // character intro
    { "page": 4, "category": 37 }, // character intro
    // ... up to 1000 tags
  ]
}

This all works, however, during the post, the serializer proceeds to make a call for each tag to check if the category_id is a valid one:

With up to 1000 nested tags in a call, I can't afford this.
How do I "prefetch" for the validation?
If this is impossible, how do I turn off the validation that checks if a foreign_key id is in the database?

EDIT: Additional Info

Here is the view:

class BookViewSet(views.APIView):

    queryset = Book.objects.all().select_related('tags', 'tags__category')
    permission_classes = [IsAdminUser]

    def post(self, request, format=None):
        serializer = BookSerializer(data=request.data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.save()
            return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

Answer 1

The DRF serializer is not the place (in my own opinion) to optimize a DB query. Serializer has 2 jobs:

1. Serialize and check the validity of input data.
2. Serialize output data.

Therefore the correct place to optimize your query is the corresponding view.
We will use the select_related method that:

Returns a QuerySet that will “follow” foreign-key relationships, selecting additional related-object data when it executes its query. This is a performance booster which results in a single more complex query but means later use of foreign-key relationships won’t require database queries. to avoid the N+1 database queries.

You will need to modify the part of your view code that creates the corresponding queryset, in order to include a select_related call.
You will also need to add a related_name to the Tag.category field definition.

Example:

# In your Tag model:
category = models.ForeignKey(
    'app.TagCategory', on_delete=models.PROTECT, related_name='categories'
)

# In your queryset defining part of your View:
class BookViewSet(views.APIView):

    queryset = Book.objects.all().select_related(
        'tags', 'tags__categories'
    )  # We are using the related_name of the ForeignKey relationships.

---

If you want to test something different that uses also the serializer to cut down the number of queries, you can check this article.