I rarely just parrot-link another blogger’s post, but I’m going to make an exception here to give props to Chris Sells and his excellent “The Performance Implications of IEnumerable vs. IQueryable.”

Chris, the venerated Microsoft Legend, walks us through a great example of where the use of IEnumerable vs IQueryable can get you into trouble. With a simple swap, Chris goes from returning every row in a table to a simple count(*).

The critical thing to learn is that IQueryable is “composable” meaning that you can make one from another before executing the final “outer” query and having the composed expression parsed and executed.

One additional note, however, is the gotcha that can bite you on the keester if you’re not careful. With an IQueryable dependent upon a data context, don’t lose the context or you’ll end up with:

ObjectDisposedException: Cannot access a disposed object. Object name: 'DataContext accessed after Dispose.'.

So watch out for the dangling context. :)