Kapil Koju Not true. HQL will also return the "duplicated" entities. This is even required by the JPA spec. The difference is that HQL and Hibernate's legacy Criteria API is that HQL disregards the eager on the initial query - you get a N+1. Do the same thing in HQL (here from ReportSchedule s join fetch s.emailAddresses) and you will get the same exact results.

For posterity... feel free to add comments here of course, but this will not be changing. We have even deprecated support for the legacy Criteria API, so it will doubly not change.