LINQ is neat because it maps from the C# IEnumerable API to SQL. So you use the same methods to work with in-memory collections as you do database tables, which

LINQ is neat because it maps from the C# IEnumerable API to SQL. So you use the same methods to work with in-memory collections as you do database tables, which leads to a very natural feeling programmer experience. Compare to Rails' Active record where `things.where(foo: 6)` calls out to the database but `things.filter { |t| t.foo == 6 }` will pull all the things into memory and then iterate through them to create the filtered list. In LINQ those are both `things.Where(t => t.foo == 6)` and the type of "things" determines where the query executes.