How the N+1 Query Problem Caused a Spring Boot API to Execute 500 SQL Queries Per Request

A developer discovered that a Spring Boot API was generating 500 separate SQL queries for a single user request, causing response times to balloon from 200ms to over 3 seconds within two weeks of production deployment. The root cause was Hibernate's default lazy loading behavior, where each Order entity triggered an individual database query to fetch its associated Customer record. Enabling query logging revealed that what should have been one database call was instead producing hundreds of sequential queries. Two fixes were identified: switching the relationship fetch type to EAGER for a quick resolution, or using a JPQL fetch join query to load related entities in a single optimized SQL statement. The fetch join approach is recommended as the more targeted solution, since blanket eager loading can introduce unnecessary data fetching on endpoints that do not require related entities.
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