Scenario: findById on an order with 1 item, then on an order with 5 items — no @EntityGraph, no fetch annotation, this is the default and only behaviour. statements for 1-item order: 2 (items loaded: 1) statements for 5-item order: 2 (items loaded: 5) Both counts are the same. There is no lazy vs eager choice to make because Spring Data JDBC has no lazy loading: findById always returns the complete aggregate. Compare to JpaBehaviorTest scenario 02, where the naive path is O(N) in the number of orders touched, not items.