What is Best way Sql Raw Queries or Linq

Question

I'm more familiar with SQL raw queries. Most of the time I'm using stored procedure to do complex queries and Insert,Delete,Update and Select One record are done by using Simple Entity Framework methods and Linq queries. What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of using Linq and SQL Row queries and what is the best practice.

Answer 1

SQL will almost always be (a lot) quicker as it is highly optimised towards the returning of specific sets of data. It uses complex indexing to manage knowing where to look for the data to be able to do this. This does however also often depend on your database maintenance. For example you can speed up the way your database searches by adding indexes to your databases, so as you can see, SQL requires more work than simply writing a stored procedure if you want to optimise the performance.

Linq on the other hand is a lot quicker to implement as opposed to SQL Stored procedures which tend to take longer to write and don't require you to perform maintenance on the data. Personally I find SQL difficult to read whereas Linq and programmatic code comes quite naturally to me.

Therefore I would say SQL is quicker and more tedious whereas the programmatic approach is slower but easier to implement.

If you are working on a small dataset you could probably get away with Linq, but if your working with a large database SQL is almost always the way to go.