Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a joy to work with, simplifying database interactions and relationship management. One of its powerful features is eager loading, which helps to mitigate the dreaded "N+1 query problem" by fetching related data in advance. However, there are situations where eager loading might not be the most efficient approach. This post will delve into how to prevent eager loading in Laravel and explore the reasons why you might intentionally choose this path.
Understanding Eager Loading
Before we discuss preventing it, let's briefly recap what eager loading does. When you access a related model through a relationship Laravel might execute a separate query for each post to fetch its comments. If you have many posts, this can lead to a large number of database queries – the N+1 problem.