Why your ORM hides the source of slow N+1 queries — and how to fix it

A developer building a runtime N+1 query detector for Node.js found that the tool accurately flagged repeated slow queries but failed to identify the originating line of application code when used with the Drizzle ORM. The root cause turned out to be Drizzle's lazy thenable design: a query object is built immediately but only executes when the JavaScript runtime calls `.then()` during an `await`, by which point the original call stack has already unwound. This means no application frame survives in the stack trace at the moment the database driver is invoked — the information is not filtered out, it simply no longer exists. By contrast, ORMs like TypeORM use standard async functions that Node.js tracks across await boundaries, preserving the original call location. The finding highlights a subtle but meaningful difference in how ORM execution models affect runtime observability and debugging tooling.