Introduction When fetching an entity, all attributes are going to be loaded as well. This is because every entity attribute is implicitly marked with the @Basic annotation whose default fetch policy is FetchType.EAGER. However, the attribute fetch strategy can be set to FetchType.LAZY, in which case the entity attribute is loaded with a secondary select statement upon being accessed for the first time. This configuration alone is not sufficient because Hibernate requires bytecode instrumentation to intercept the attribute access request and issue the secondary select statement on demand.