In my opinion there is nothing wrong with doing simple Django ORM calls even with a tornado/gevent websocket. Async purists will cry foul, but if all you want i

In my opinion there is nothing wrong with doing simple Django ORM calls even with a tornado/gevent websocket. Async purists will cry foul, but if all you want is a realtime feature, you can block for a few milliseconds without getting into trouble. In the long run they might build tulip-awareness into the ORM. For that matter I start Tornado servers with management commands just for convenience...