I wouldn't make it an if statement unless it's going to be a part of the standard flow. I think the catchphrase is "leap before you look". Though your right tha

I wouldn't make it an if statement unless it's going to be a part of the standard flow. I think the catchphrase is "leap before you look". Though your right that a single query is better. Honestly, I normally just use get and let the exception fly. If it's a celery task I'll see the stack trace in flower, or right in the output if it's dev with debug on. Then I would go out of my way to make sure there was never a circumstance where a user requests something that doesn't exist.