Prevent slow INNER JOIN in Django model calls when unnecessary

Question

Is it possible to prevent Django from using INNER JOIN in SQL relationship queries when unnecessary?

I have the two tables:

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50, primary_key=True, db_index=True)
    hometown = models.CharField(max_length=50)

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50, primary_key=True, db_index=True)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author, db_index=True)

The author table has more than 50 million rows, which makes requests such getting all the books of one author, Book.objects.filter(author_id='John Smith'), incredibly slow (about 20 sec). However, when I use raw SQL to achieve the same result, the query is almost instant: SELECT * FROM books WHERE author_id='John Smith';.

Using result.query I have found that Django is slower because it runs a INNER JOIN query on the entire table:

SELECT books.title, books.author_id FROM books INNER JOIN authors 
    ON (books.author_id = authors.name) WHERE books.author_id = 'John Smith';

Is there a way to make Django avoid the INNER JOIN in cases such as this when it isn't necessary?

I would like to avoid using raw SQL queries if at all possible as this database structure is highly simplified.

Answer 1

The solution turned out to be removing a class Meta option:

class Book(models.Model):

    (...)

    class Meta:
        ordering = ['author', 'title']