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  • I am not quite forced to use the design, so I can change it. It is mostly that the tables truly do contain vastly different columns and thus different data. The way they "belong" together is more that I deem them all important enough to want to know as a user when they have been updated. A view is a great idea though! I am aware of them and used them before, just never with Django's ORM, which is why I initially dismissed that idea. A quick google search told me though that views can be connected to Django's ORM so the fact I didn't think of that is entirely on me. Thanks for the answer! Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 13:21
  • Doesn't even need a view, just needs a SELECT query that performs the union across all tables, and then ORDER BY with a LIMIT. This will be efficient if the involved tables have an index on the update datetime column. Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 13:23
  • @amon That is true, Hans' approach does have 2 advantages though: 1) I can leverage Django's ORM with it, as Django models can be connected to view-tables (which I hadn't been aware of before). 2) If I have multiple occurrences for this kind of query I save myself the hassle in the future. Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 13:25
  • have you any data on how performant it is to use top and union? I would assume that it would need to retrieve more records than required and then trim off the extra, but maybe sql optimises that away Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 13:46
  • I think that given appropriate indexes could yield acceptable performance, as the SQL engine can probably do a merge sort based on the indexed datetime fields. Commented Aug 14, 2021 at 14:12