pg_serializer: Very fast JSON serializer using Django and PostgreSQL

Overview

Django REST framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs.

Django Rest Framework is a great framework for building REST APIs on top of Django and it fits 99% of use cases.
However, JSON serialization is done in Python and it can be very slow for some list endpoints that return a lot of records.

pg_serializer aims to soften this 1% issue by providing a way to do JSON serialization inside your PostgreSQL database. Indeed, PostgreSQL has a built-in support for JSON since version 9.2, and it is far more faster than Python's one.

Installation

pip install pg-serializer

Basic usage

pg_serializer features an automatic ModelSerializer like DRF.

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

import pg_serializer


class UserSerializer(pg_serializer.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = (
            "id",
            "username",
            "email",
            "first_name",
            "last_name",
            "is_staff",
            "date_joined",
        )


json_str = UserSerializer(User.objects.all()).json

It also has preliminary support for ForeignKey relation using the Django __ separator.

import pg_serializer


class OrderSerializer(pg_serializer.ModelSerializer):
    buyer = pg_serializer.StringField(source="buyer__username")

    class Meta:
        model = Order
        fields = (
            "transaction_id",
            "transaction_time",
            "buyer",
            "is_gift",
            "shipping_date",
            "additional_data",
        )


json_str = OrderSerializer(Order.objects.all()).json

Full examples are available inside tests/models.py and tests/serializers.py.

Disclaimer ⚠️

• pg_serializer is not designed to replace DRF serializers, only to speed up some endpoints when performance is becoming an issue
• pg_serializer is still in alpha development: bugs can occur and it doesn't support all Django fields and relations

Roadmap

• reinforce the test suite
• implement (and document) custom datetime and decimal formatting
• document how to create custom serializer fields
• full support for ArrayField and JSONField
• complex queryset operations (GROUP BY, ...) support