alt Hacker NewsThe application joins are (soon to be were) done in Rust service that's side loaded with the node server.
Also, this is an old quote. Databases didn't all support things like JSON at the time, so joins and subqueries presented an N+1 problem and could balloon data fetch requirements fairly easily. Being a GraphQL-focused ORM originally too, this made some sense.
The default is now being changed and correlated subqueries, JOINs, & JSON aggregation will replace the old approach unless explicitly toggled.
As I understand it the N+1 problem is when you select a set and then perform another query per row in the set. Executing a join is a solution to this, not a cause.