You're correct. It's common for GraphQL API implementations to batch all the parent record's fields up front, but it's not the only way. One alternative method is to traverse the whole query object and generate one big query to your database (SQL, graph database, what have you) instead of batching queries per table/object. This has trade-offs. Sometimes it's more performant, especially for smaller queries, but for larger queries it can actually be slower because joining lots of tables into one query causes some duplicated data and transfer overhead (assuming you're using SQL). I have a feeling that this method would perform very well if your GraphQL data was backed by an actual graph database though.