The document discusses different strategies for retrieving objects from a database using Hibernate including retrieval by identifier, HQL queries, and criteria queries. It also describes Hibernate fetching strategies like lazy fetching, eager fetching, and batch fetching which can be used to minimize database access and solve the "n+1 selects" problem of loading associated objects. The "n+1 selects" problem occurs when lazy loading associated collections, resulting in n queries to load the parent objects and then n additional queries - one for each collection. This problem can be addressed using batch fetching, eager fetching, or fetching associations within queries.