N+1 queries are a frequent problem in Laravel that make your app slower because of unnecessary database calls. Imagine you’re at a grocery store with a shopping list. Instead of grabbing all the items in one go, you go to the checkout and back for each item. This is inefficient, right? That’s what happens in your app with N+1 queries. By identifying and solving these issues, your Laravel app becomes much faster.
What is N+1 Queries in Laravel?
N+1 queries happen when your code asks the database for data in an inefficient way.
For example, if you have a list of 100 blog posts, and you also want to show the author’s name with each post. If you don’t use eager loading, Laravel will first make one query to retrieve all 100 blog posts. Then, for each of these posts, it makes an additional query to fetch the author’s name. This results in a total of 101 queries (1 initial query for all posts + 100 individual queries for each post’s author).
Implementing N+1 Queries in Laravel with Examples
❌ Wrong Way
$$
$posts = Post::all();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
echo $post->author->name;
}
$$
This code makes too many database calls.
✅ Right Way:
$$
$posts = Post::with(‘author’)->get();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
echo $post->author->name;
}
$$
