Dealing with Django, they give quite a few ways to query data. For the small internal web site we ran, I've yet to encounter an N+1 situation that I didn't find an alternative Django API that I should have been using.

Not saying you never need bare SQL on Django sites, but the Django ORM does have some sophisticated APIs to prevent this problem.

> Even without join problems, if you ask an ORM to get the person with user id 123 and all you want is their name, the ORM cannot know that unless to tell it

So ... tell it! You can specify in a query to fetch only certain data, and not the whole object.