Optimize query size in Django

Problem

When your project grows, it's possible that with time you'll start having models with more and more fields.
What are the consequences of that? Well, if you have a model with more than 30 fields and you are trying to retrieve an object or a list of objects from the database, the return queryset will be really heavy.
And it's possible you won't definitely need all the fields.

How to optimize the query?

Django provides the only() method that returns a queryset with objects that only contain the list of fields and the values specified in the only(*args).
As stated in Django,

Here's an example:

from django.db import models


class User(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    email = models.EmailField(max_length=254)
    bio = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    def __str__(self) -> str:
        return "%s (%s)" % (self.name,
            ", ".join(profile.first_name for profile in self.profile_set.all()))

And here's the queryset:

users = User.objects.only('name', 'email').all()

There is also the defer() method -- opposite to only -- that can be used to remove fields you don't want to use in a particular query.
Following this, these two queries are identical if the User table has only name, email, and bio fields.

users = User.objects.only('name', 'email').all()

users = User.objects.defer('bio').all()

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