Many years ago, I wrote a Java ORM that solved that exact problem. But I still have come around 180 degrees to the view that ORMs are terrible. Even aside from

Many years ago, I wrote a Java ORM that solved that exact problem. But I still have come around 180 degrees to the view that ORMs are terrible. Even aside from this N+1 problem, to use an ORM well, you have to understand the SQL that you want to be generated, and then instead of writing that SQL, you have the additional problem of having to know exactly what to say to the ORM to get that SQL generated. Also: you don't always want objects returned; sometimes partially instantiated objects are what you want; bulk updates are hard to get right; stored procedures break everything; and on and on. The thing that really started me on the path to my current view was a conversation with an app developer who was evaluating our project. Just from a career point of view, having Oracle on her resume was a lot more valuable than having OurProprietaryORM on her resume. That, combined with the realization that solving the N+1 problem was really a pretty minor thing, and that all the other problems were even harder to solve. The approach I have been using for a while is to use a very simple mapping layer that hides some of the ugliness of JDBC, but still lets me write SQL directly. I understand that MyBatis does something like this, although I haven't used it.