Clarifying terminology - What does “hydrating” a JPA or Hibernate entity mean when fetching the entity from the DB

Question

In the context of ORM / Lazy loading of entities, my understanding of the term \"Hydration\" is as follows:

\"Hydrating\" describes the process of populating some or

Answer 1

the term hydration is extensively used in the guts of the hibernate library to refer to the process of setting the fields of a recently loaded object, and is indeed related to the object graph populaton.
but it's different than the concept of lazy loading, that is, giving the user a half-filled object and letting the rest be loaded on demand.
the hydration is always performed, lazily or eagerly and it's hibernate stuff.
lazy loading is just for convenience

replace hibernate with the name of your orm of choice