Ordering of instructions like you’ve shown often won’t make a difference in EF or LINQ to SQL. The query builder turns your entire LINQ statement into an abstract logical representation, and then another pass converts the logical structure into a SQL statement. So the WHERE
predicates are all going to end up in the same place. The predicates inside a First()
just get pushed over to the WHERE
clause. The Include
statements also get accumulated and projected to JOIN
s to include the extra columns needed to produce the included entity.
So the short answer is that EF will usually produce the most logical SQL statement regardless of the order in which you constructed your LINQ statement. If you need to tune it further, you should look at a stored procedure where you can hand-craft the SQL.