Laravel Eloquent: How does it work? Based on dynamic Schema MetaData-Lookup = Performance?

Question

The whole persistance layer is a rather big and complex laravel component. Is there someone who has already looked at it in depth and can explain it in a few words, whats going on schematically under the hood?

1. Eloquent (in contrast to other ORM Layers) seems to not cache/store the Column Metadata somewhere in the application? Or does it? (In Java JPA or Doctrine this is done via Annotations, but laravel seems to not have this metadata?)
2. This would mean that it has to query on every request the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS from MySQL. Does this mean, that laravel will for every simple SQL query have to iusse two queries (the first one to get the column/table definitions?)
3. Will calling hasColumn on a new Instance/Facade inevitably lead to an SQL Query, just to retrieve the metadata/table-definition?

Answer 1

As far as i know, you are right, Eloquent does not cache or store the column metadata. But this does not mean that each query requires a second on which requests the information schema. The query builder just assumes that you know which column names are legal and creates and sends the query. This means, that if you select an unknown column, you'll get an exception! Finally hasColumn leads to an SQL query.