It produces what you tell it. The thing is Linq is a more general language than SQL. If you tell EF to generate something that would be really hard to transla

It produces what you tell it. The thing is Linq is a more general language than SQL. If you tell EF to generate something that would be really hard to translate to SQL then of course it's going to do a bad job. Just by taking a few seconds to think how the query you are writing will translate into SQL goes a long way towards helping EF produce good, clean queries. EF still provides many benefits on top of this so imo it's worth it but at the end of the day whether you are writing SQL or EF you have to understand the basics of how databases work.