It's really amazing what poorly-written frameworks have done to the minds of people. When I teach classes on DBIx::Class (the Perl ORM), my students are shocked that $foo->bar->baz actually generates the SQL to follow the two relations as opposed to the "easy" "get list of results, then run query on each result, then return an array...". Actually, $foo->bar->baz, by itself, doesn't touch the database. The database is only contacted when you actually try to get information out of the result object. (And of course, the database is only queried once.)