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The default behavior for Django Models is to create an auto-incrementing integer primary key named “id”.
Setting DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD to ‘django.db.models.BigAutoField’ in Django is not necessary in most cases, but it can be helpful in specific scenarios.
By default, Django uses AutoField for primary keys, an integer-based field that automatically increments.
However, in some cases, especially when dealing with very large databases or databases that may exceed the maximum value of an integer, such as when dealing with billions of records, it might be beneficial to use BigAutoField instead.
BigAutoField is an auto-incrementing primary key field that uses a BIGINT data type in the database, allowing for much larger values than AutoField.
Setting DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD to ‘django.db.models.BigAutoField’ ensures that any new models you create will use BigAutoField as the primary key field by default, unless explicitly overridden.
BigAutoField is recommended only if you know that your database will become very large
If you anticipate your database growing to a very large size where AutoField might not be sufficient, using BigAutoField from the start can prevent you from having to migrate your primary key fields later.
Will be significant performance improvements?
While the performance impact is likely negligible for most applications, using BigAutoField might have slight performance benefits when dealing with extensive databases due to the increased range of values and potentially fewer index updates.
Conclusions
However, it’s important to note that using BigAutoField comes with its considerations, such as potential storage implications and differences in behavior compared to AutoField, so evaluating whether it’s necessary for your specific use case is essential.
Additionally, if you’re already using AutoField and your database isn’t expected to grow to an extremely large size, there might not be a significant benefit to switching to BigAutoField.
Read more here about default auto field in Django
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