How can I retrieve a single object, without its associations to other objects?

That is, prevent joining collections, many-to-one's, etc...

Need this for performance in certain situations..

find appears to take the whole graph whatever I do. I'm using non-lazy setups.

Your only choice is to use proxies (Lazy) or use a data object and load it using a find query, eg, s.find("select new DataObject(t.arg1, t.arg2) from Table as t");

In your mapping files, for every "set" use lazy="true". This way, when you load a object, the associated "set" is not loaded at this time.

Would it be hard to add a "nojoin" construct?

I.e.: "from Lady as lady nojoin where lady.name = 'Cindy'"

That would be extremely useful (no sql pun intended)

HQL queries do not do any joins that you do not explicitly request - so this construct would be useless.

I said non-lazy, didn't I?

It would override non-lazyness. Pretty darn useful, if you ask me.

You can modify the Hibernate source, can't you?

Useful answer.

Thats the power of Open Source.

But only if you have time...

But only if you have time...

Like, we have to answer you questions, even if they don't make much sense? :)