Returning IEnumerable vs. IQueryable

Question

What is the difference between returning IQueryable vs. IEnumerable, when should one be preferred over the other?

Answer 1

We can use both for the same way, and they are only different in the performance.

IQueryable only executes against the database in an efficient way. It means that it creates an entire select query and only gets the related records.

For example, we want to take the top 10 customers whose name start with ‘Nimal’. In this case the select query will be generated as select top 10 * from Customer where name like ‘Nimal%’.

But if we used IEnumerable, the query would be like select * from Customer where name like ‘Nimal%’ and the top ten will be filtered at the C# coding level (it gets all the customer records from the database and passes them into C#).