Django's ORM is extremely powerful, allowing you to manage your data without ever going near a line of SQL and hiding a multitude of complexities. But its power can sometimes be a curse rather than a blessing, multiplying queries without your knowledge and bringing your database to its knees. In this session I explain what's going on behind the scenes and present some techniques to make your ORM use more efficient, showing how to monitor what's going on and how to better deal with relationships, indexes and more. This talk was presented at Europython 2010 in Birmingham.