Just something to consider...

It might be nice to allow definition of an EntityGraph for a Query (HQL) "inline", using the syntax defined by the GraphParser (HHH-12713). E.g.

compared to:

Possibly even something like:

Un-relatedly (mental note)... Currently org.hibernate.graph.GraphParser#parse takes Session for argument. However, it only ever uses the Session to get the SessionFactory. And conceptually there is no real reason for this to be Session-specific. We ought to add overloads that accept SessionFactory and have the ones accepting Session delegating to the new ones, like we do for the the org.hibernate.graph.GraphParser#parseInto methods