For Django models, is there a shortcut for seeing if a record exists?

Solution 1:

Update:

As mentioned in more recent answers, since Django 1.2 you can use the exists() method instead (link).

Original Answer:

Dont' use len() on the result, you should use People.objects.filter(Name='Fred').count(). According to the django documentation,

count() performs a SELECT COUNT(*) behind the scenes, so you should always use count() rather than loading all of the record into Python objects and calling len() on the result (unless you need to load the objects into memory anyway, in which case len() will be faster).

source: Django docs

Solution 2:

An exists() method in the QuerySet API is available since Django 1.2.