Model index reference
Index classes ease creating database indexes. They can be added using the Meta.indexes
option. This document explains the API references of Index
which includes the index options.
Referencing built-in indexes
Indexes are defined in django.db.models.indexes
, but for convenience they’re imported into django.db.models
. The standard convention is to use from django.db import models
and refer to the indexes as models.<IndexClass>
.
Index
options
class Index
(fields=(), name=None, db_tablespace=None, opclasses=(), condition=None)
Creates an index (B-Tree) in the database.
fields
A list or tuple of the name of the fields on which the index is desired.
By default, indexes are created with an ascending order for each column. To define an index with a descending order for a column, add a hyphen before the field’s name.
For example Index(fields=['headline', '-pub_date'])
would create SQL with (headline, pub_date DESC)
. Index ordering isn’t supported on MySQL. In that case, a descending index is created as a normal index.
name
The name of the index. If name
isn’t provided Django will auto-generate a name. For compatibility with different databases, index names cannot be longer than 30 characters and shouldn’t start with a number (0-9) or underscore (_).
Partial indexes in abstract base classes
You must always specify a unique name for an index. As such, you cannot normally specify a partial index on an abstract base class, since the Meta.indexes
option is inherited by subclasses, with exactly the same values for the attributes (including name
) each time. To work around name collisions, part of the name may contain '%(app_label)s'
and '%(class)s'
, which are replaced, respectively, by the lowercased app label and class name of the concrete model. For example Index(fields=['title'], name='%(app_label)s_%(class)s_title_index')
.
Changed in Django 3.0:
Interpolation of '%(app_label)s'
and '%(class)s'
was added.
db_tablespace
The name of the database tablespace to use for this index. For single field indexes, if db_tablespace
isn’t provided, the index is created in the db_tablespace
of the field.
If Field.db_tablespace
isn’t specified (or if the index uses multiple fields), the index is created in tablespace specified in the db_tablespace
option inside the model’s class Meta
. If neither of those tablespaces are set, the index is created in the same tablespace as the table.
See also
For a list of PostgreSQL-specific indexes, see django.contrib.postgres.indexes
.
opclasses
The names of the PostgreSQL operator classes to use for this index. If you require a custom operator class, you must provide one for each field in the index.
For example, GinIndex(name='json_index', fields=['jsonfield'], opclasses=['jsonb_path_ops'])
creates a gin index on jsonfield
using jsonb_path_ops
.
opclasses
are ignored for databases besides PostgreSQL.
Index.name
is required when using opclasses
.
condition
If the table is very large and your queries mostly target a subset of rows, it may be useful to restrict an index to that subset. Specify a condition as a Q
. For example, condition=Q(pages__gt=400)
indexes records with more than 400 pages.
Index.name
is required when using condition
.
Restrictions on PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL requires functions referenced in the condition to be marked as IMMUTABLE. Django doesn’t validate this but PostgreSQL will error. This means that functions such as Date functions and Concat
aren’t accepted. If you store dates in DateTimeField
, comparison to datetime
objects may require the tzinfo
argument to be provided because otherwise the comparison could result in a mutable function due to the casting Django does for lookups.
Restrictions on SQLite
SQLite imposes restrictions on how a partial index can be constructed.
Oracle
Oracle does not support partial indexes. Instead, partial indexes can be emulated using functional indexes. Use a migration to add the index using RunSQL
.
MySQL and MariaDB
The condition
argument is ignored with MySQL and MariaDB as neither supports conditional indexes.