To be fair, I have seen plenty of cases where doing a join in code is actually better for performance reasons. And I am apparently not alone since Django’s pref

To be fair, I have seen plenty of cases where doing a join in code is actually better for performance reasons. And I am apparently not alone since Django’s prefetch_related() does exactly this. Reading a two million rows from a database is faster than one trillion. Having said that, I’d your database doesn’t support joins, you have no option and are stuck having to do it in application code and that sucks.