Django ORM: From sync_to_async Threads to Native psycopg3

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Django shipped async ORM methods back in 3.1, and for years I told people they were not really async. aget(), afilter(), acreate(), the whole a-prefixed surface — the docs called it async support, and in the sense that mattered it was not. Every one of those calls still blocked a real OS thread. You got coroutine syntax without coroutine performance.

Django 6.0 fixed it for real in December 2025. I want to walk through the path from “fake async via threads” to “native async via psycopg3,” because it is not a story about a feature landing. It is a story about three constraints that boxed Django in for five years: psycopg2 blocks, connection state lived in thread-locals, and the entire ORM assumed DB-API2. Once you see those three, every design decision Django made falls out of them almost mechanically.

Async on ⎨ Saurabh Kumar ⎬

Django ORM: From sync_to_async Threads to Native psycopg3