[paulmd]

> A simple example is, say, foreign keys. Trying to access the foreign key of an object by doing `book.user.id` does an additional query for the user table to get the ID. It's less known that the id is immediately available by just doing `book.user_id` instead.

Hibernate (on Java) at least optimizes this specific use-case. At first, accessing a lazy-loaded property-object will give you a "proxy" and you can access the ID without incurring a database load (since it knows that anyway). And when doing a query, the object won't be joined when requesting book.user.id unless it needs to be (like you have some other WHERE clause that requires an actual join on that row).