How to make Django QuerySet bulk delete() more efficient

Setup:
Django 1.1.2, MySQL 5.1

Problem:

Blob.objects.filter(foo = foo) \
            .filter(status = Blob.PLEASE_DELETE) \
            .delete()

This snippet results in the ORM first generating a SELECT * from xxx_blob where ... query, then doing a DELETE from xxx_blob where id in (BLAH); where BLAH is a ridiculously long list of id's. Since I'm deleting a large amount of blobs, this makes both me and the DB very unhappy.

Is there a reason for this? I don't see why the ORM can't convert the above snippet into a single DELETE query. Is there a way to optimize this without resorting to raw SQL?

Solution

Not without writing your own custom SQL or managers or something; they are apparently working on it though.

http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9519