I think your characterisation of eager vs lazy fetch is oversimplified. Lazy loading can be a source of substantial performance problems as well, since doing l

I think your characterisation of eager vs lazy fetch is oversimplified. Lazy loading can be a source of substantial performance problems as well, since doing larger operations that do hit a lot of data causes enormous chattiness with the DB, causing you to lose a bunch of time to network I/O. Lazy loading was the source of a lot of early 'ORMs are slow' arguments. A good ORM will likely default to lazy loading but give you good options for eager retrieval when you know you're going to need it.