We have never added implicit joins to HQL/criteria queries for EAGER associations, since for to-many associations that would change the semantics of the query.

But, we could in principle do it only for to-one associations. That would make your program faster with little real downside.

See: https://twitter.com/1ovthafew/status/1660238087325114368

Now, we definitely wouldn’t want to make a change like that by default, since in rare cases it could break programs. And besides, I guess we want to experiment with it first; it’s a pretty big change.

But we could add a setting to let people opt in.

WDYT?