database development eloquent laravel php

Imagine you have two tables posts and authors. Posts table has a column author_id which represents a belongsTo relationship on the authors table.

To get the author id of a post, we would normally do

<?php
$post = Post::findOrFail(<post id>);
$post->author->id;

This would result in two queries being executed.

select * from posts where id = <post id> limit 1
select * from authors where id = <post author id> limit 1

Instead, you can directly get the author id by doing the following.

<?php
$post = Post::findOrFail(<post id>);
$post->author_id; // posts table has a column author_id which stores id of the author

When can I use the above approach? You can use the above approach when you are confident that a row always exists in authors table if it is referenced in posts table.

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