"In short the problem is that the basic Linq construction (we don’t really have to reach for a complex query to illustrate) results in repeated evaluations of t

"In short the problem is that the basic Linq construction (we don’t really have to reach for a complex query to illustrate) results in repeated evaluations of the query if you ran the query more than once." It sounds to me like Rico is advocating the prepare/execute model. With ODBC, it's possible to generate a query plan on the client side. What Rico is saying is that it generates a query and then sends the raw query to the database. This would have been a valid point before SQL Server 2005, but according to Microsoft "the prepare/execute model has no significant performance advantage over direct execution, because of the way SQL Server reuses execution plans." http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175528.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175528.aspx