freeze

You can use the freeze clause with any query type.

Source

Query.freeze() → FrozenQuery

This is a performance optimisation when the same query is run repeatedly. For example:

TOP_BANDS = Band.select(
    Band.name
).order_by(
    Band.popularity,
    ascending=False
).limit(
    10
).output(
    as_json=True
).freeze()

# In the corresponding view/endpoint of whichever web framework
# you're using:
async def top_bands(self, request):
    return await TOP_BANDS

It means that Piccolo doesn’t have to work as hard each time the query is run to generate the corresponding SQL - some of it is cached. If the query is defined within the view/endpoint, it has to generate the SQL from scratch each time.

Once a query is frozen, you can’t apply any more clauses to it (where, limit, output etc).

Even though freeze helps with performance, there are limits to how much it can help, as most of the time is still spent waiting for a response from the database. However, for high throughput apps and data science scripts, it’s a worthwhile optimisation.