Lazy initilasation in Hibernate

Hibernate supports the feature of lazy initilasation for both entities and collections. What this actually means is, the Hibernate engine loads only those objects that we are querying for and doesnt try to fetch other entities(that are associated with the entity we are querying) or collections.

An attribute 'lazy' can be used to let Hibernate know if the associated entity or collection has to be lazily loaded or prefetched.


This causes the collection to be eagerly fetched rather than doing a lazy fetch. If on the other hand , the attribute value of lazy is set to true, then hibernate will not make an attempt to fire the query for fetching the collection object until the request is made by the user.