[hibernate-dev] Why does implicit join translate to inner join?

Hello, Vlad Mihalcea [1] was so kind to point me to this mailing list with my question about implicit joins. The user guide [2] states that: "Implicit joins are always treated as inner joins." To me, this seems wrong, semantically, if implicit joins follow optional (nullable) foreign key relationships. Let's assume that customers have optional addresses. When we write SELECT c.firstName, c.lastName, c.address.city.country.code FROM customer c The resulting query will INNER JOIN the customer / address / city / country tables, filtering out customers with no address, or addresses with no cities, or cities with no countries (let's ignore the modelling aspect). In fact, I got a CROSS JOIN with join predicate in the WHERE clause, but that doesn't really change anything. Hence the SELECT clause applies a filter, which is rather surprising. To me, this seems simply wrong just like it would be wrong for Stream.map() to apply any filters. However, I'm sure there must have been good reasons to default to this behaviour, even in the presence of optional foreign keys. Does anyone know what those reasons are? Cheers, Lukas [1]: https://twitter.com/vlad_mihalcea/status/965927462684196864 [2]: http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.2/userguide/ html_single/Hibernate_User_Guide.html#hql-implicit-join