Does exactly that. Runs your SQL against the database at compile time to get type information, which it injects into the program AST.
It's not the ORM that causes problems, it's all about the mindset of thinking that you don't have to worry about anything because the ORM will have your back anyway. I use ActiveRecord in Rails every day and there's a lot of things it just does right. It abstracts certain things I wouldn't want to constantly have to worry about and gives me a fine-grained enough layer of control over the queries that I can actually get all the expressiveness and power I need from the records.
Like they say, don't throw the baby with the bath water my friend.
It's really a PIA.
Recently, I've learned about http://jooq.org/ — not having checked in detail yet, it might be easier there.
i.e. rails' ActiveRecord allows you to select columns easily in most cases:
User.where(..) # all fields
User.where(..).select(:name, :id) # only two of them
joe.boards.select(:title) # only one in join
joe.boards.pluck(:title) # only column value instead of full objects with one attribute set
You should also be able to setup the select as a default per-class, other than per query.
I suspect, I likely didn't understand your question, could you expand it?
My apologies if it was a dumb question. :)
.only(… field list…)
.defer(… fields to fetch on demand…)