To answer the OP, no. Your compiler will never do the optimization you want it to do, no matter how high you try and move up the abstraction. The fundamental

To answer the OP, no. Your compiler will never do the optimization you want it to do, no matter how high you try and move up the abstraction. The fundamental issue isn't just that your compiler doesn't understand SQL. The problem is that your compiler doesn't understand how data is or will be stored. It's blind to the current state of the dataset. For example, maybe it's the case that the data is stored in a hashtable and it's rarely written. In that case, N+1 might actually be the right way to query the data to avoid excessive read locks across the database. Perhaps the data has 1, 2 or several indexes created against it. Those indexes can change at anytime and have to be consciously made as building them can take a lot of resources. RDBMS build up a huge amount of statistics for optimizations purposes. That's all information you'd have to have the compiler JIT into the application to get similar performance or to have a good feeling for how to do the optimization.