Creating objects that contain objects

Question

What's the best practice for creating an object from a table that contains a list of objects from another table? For example, say I have an employees table:
EMPLOYEES
id    name
1     Derek Epperson
2     Judy Johnsonand I also have an equipment table that contains all the equipment belonging to each employee
EQUIPMENT
id    emp_id   name
101   1        Laptop Computer
102   1        Flash Drive
103   2        Desktop Computer
104   2        Wireless RouterI want to create a Java function that will return create a List of two Employees, each with a List<Equipment> of that employee's equipment. One option is to create the Employees and then query for Equipment separately, like this:
List<Employee> employees = myDAO.getEmployees();
for (Employee employee : employees) {
  employee.setEquipment(myDAO.getEquipment(employee.getId()));
}However, that is a lot of database calls. Is there an easy way to do this in a single query?

Answer 1

By JOIN, you mean connect them so that a query will return something like this?
EMPLOYEES
id    name             equip_id   equip_name
1     Derek Epperson   101        Laptop Computer
1     Derek Epperson   102        Flash Drive
2     Judy Johnson     103        Desktop Computer
2     Judy Johnson     104        Wireless RouterThen I would have to check on each row whether the id had changed, a la:
rs = ps.executeQuery(getEmployeesAndEquipmentJoin);
int previousId = -1;
Employee employee
while (rs.next()) {
  if (rs.getInt("id") != previousId) {
    previousId = rs.getInt("id");
    employee = new Employee(rs);
    employees.add(employee);
  employee.getEquipment.add(new Equipment(rs));
}That seems a little awkward, but if that's the best way to do it without ORM then I can work with that.