Question

In Entity Framework, is there any performance cost of doing this…

var businesses = dbContext.Businesses.Where(x => x.Name.ToLower().StartsWith(name) && businessTypes.Contains(x.Type));

… versus this?

var businesses = dbContext.Businesses.Where(x => x.Name.ToLower().StartsWith(name)).Where(x => businessTypes.Contains(x.Type));

I prefer to do the latter since it’s easier to read, but not if there’s a serious performance hit on the generated SQL.

Answer 1

No there is no performance cost – the EF Linq provider maps both to the same SQL query. I personally find the first version much more readable though.