11. How to find second largest record using Django ORM ?

You would across situations when you want to find second highest user depending on their age or salary.

Though the ORM gives the flexibility of finding first(), last() item from the queryset but not nth item. You can do it using the slice operator.

We can find Nth records from the query by using slice operator.

>>> user = User.objects.order_by('-last_login')[1] // Second Highest record w.r.t 'last_login'
>>> user.first_name
'Raghu'
>>> user = User.objects.order_by('-last_login')[2] // Third Highest record w.r.t 'last_login'
>>> user.first_name
'Sohan'

User.objects.order_by('-last_login')[2] only pulls up the required object from db using LIMIT ... OFFSET. If you look at the generated sql, you would see something like this.

SELECT "auth_user"."id",
       "auth_user"."password",
       "auth_user"."last_login",
       "auth_user"."is_superuser",
       "auth_user"."username",
       "auth_user"."first_name",
       "auth_user"."last_name",
       "auth_user"."email",
       "auth_user"."is_staff",
       "auth_user"."is_active",
       "auth_user"."date_joined"
FROM "auth_user"
ORDER BY "auth_user"."last_login" DESC
LIMIT 1
OFFSET 2