I think we’d better separate the concern. How to support `select u.groups from User u` in terms of entity graph is a big question as you can see from the zulip chat. As you have known, we only support very limited HQL to enforce entity graph (e.g. select u from User u where ....) currently, so applying entity graph is exception not norm. We might add some logging to remind the user that some entity graph is applied, however.

Entity Graph is awkward feature in Hibernate v5 for the late feature is not elegantly implemented in existing infrastructure. However, we will reconsider the issue in v6 whose design makes nontrivial refactoring possible. The combination of entity graph and HQL is a great gray area and we need thorough design if we wanna support applying Group graph for select u.groups from User u.