I'm curious. Apple says in the docs:

Core Data automatically fires faults when necessary (when a persistent property of a fault is accessed). However, firing faults individually can be inefficient, and there are better strategies for getting data from the persistent store (see “Batch Faulting and Pre-fetching with the SQLite Store”).

NSFetchRequest has this feature:

[fetchRequest setFetchBatchSize:20];

Is this essentially performing such a batch faulting like recommended?

Just to make this clear for others, faulting does not mean "turning into a fault" but it means "materializing it", just like "making a Scooby-Doo out of it". Pretty ugly wording error, in my opinion, but it's at least consistent in the docs ;)