Associations are fetched lazily by default. You may change this behavior by setting the parameter fetch=FetchType.EAGER of the annotation @OneToMany for example. This has the disadvantage, that the association is eagerly fetched each time the respective entity is retrieved from the underlying database. This leads to the so called cartesian product read issue since the respective association is retrieved with the query of the owning entity via LEFT OUTER JOIN (see JPQL and joins). So, a lot of redundant data might be retrieved from the database, since the OR-Mapper has no interception point where he can prevent to retrieve data cached already. Another way is to overwrite the lazy fetch type in a jpql query (see override fetch type). So the cartesian product read issue does still exist, but you can control when to eagerly fetch an assoctiation and when not.
Read More