[nodoodles]

I have thought of that as ‘n’ being the manageable threshold and the (uncontrolled) ‘+1’ the overflow creates the problems. Typically in terms of additional layers or iterations.. but i like your point and perhaps’n+1’ and ‘1+n’ mean different problem shapes

[crabmusket]

I could see that making sense in some contexts, like the "straw that breaks the camel's back". However that's not what's usually being referred to in this database query problem.

Usually it's doing one query that returns n results, then doing one more query for each result. Therefore, you end up having done 1+n queries. If you'd used a join you could potentially have done only 1 query.