Django: How to disable ordering in model

Question

Let's say there is a model with default ordering described in Meta class

class People(models.Model):
    first_name  = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    last_name   = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    middle_name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    class Meta:
        ordering = (last_name, first_name)

Is there are a way to get unordered queryset

Answer 1

You can just override by simply adding .order_by()

for example:

People.objects.all().order_by()

This will make sure that Meta ordering is overridden.

Answer 2

Using an empty order_by() worked for queries with filters.

BUT asking for the .first() element was problematic and always resulted in ORDER BY. To overcome this what I did was a little bit ugly:

People.objects.all().order_by()[:1].values_list(...)[0]

This effectively removes the ORDER BY, and avoids the problem that asking for [:1][0] where it would get optimized and add it anyway. At the moment I don't know about other workarounds, but I'd love to hear them. I tried doing the above code without the values_list, but in that case Django always tried to perform the Order By.