How LINQ query works

 

Introduction and Goal
LINQ has been criticized by many early adopters for its performance issues. Well if you are just going to drag and drop using DBML code generator I am sure you will land up in to mess. Try doing this make a simple LINQ to SQL project using DBML and see your SQL profiler, I am sure you will never like to touch DBML code generator again.

In this article we will first look in to how LINQ queries are executed, and then we will touch base on how compiled LINQ queries can help us improve our application performance at least 5 times. My numbers can be 10% up and down as I had come to that figure using my environmental situations.

Deep dive in to how LINQ query works
Before we get in to how we can improve LINQ query performance, let’s first try to understand what are the various steps involved in a LINQ query execution. All LINQ queries are first converted to SQL statements. This conversion also involves checking of LINQ query syntaxes and translating this query to SQL.

Below is a simple LINQ query which selects data from a customer table. This LINQ query is then transformed in to necessary SQL statements by the LINQ engine.

The checking of syntaxes and generating SQL query accordingly is a bit of tedious job. This task is performed every time we fire LINQ query. So if we can cache the LINQ query plan we can execute much faster.

LINQ has provided something called as compiled LINQ queries. In compiled LINQ queries the plan is cached in a static class. As we all know that static class is global cache. So LINQ uses the query plan from the static class object rather than building the preparing the query plan from scratch.Below is the LINQ query caching.

In all there are 4 steps which need to be performed right from the time LINQ queries are built till they are fired. By using compiled LINQ queries the 4 steps are reduced to 2 steps.
                     
                   From http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/LINQquery.aspx#Performance%20comparison