Using Linq to SQL, how do I find min and max of a column in a table?

Question

I want to find the fastest way to get the min and max of a column in a table with a single Linq to SQL roundtrip. So I know this would work in two roundtrips:

Answer 1

You could select the whole table, and do your min and max operations in memory:

var cache = // select *

var min = cache.Min(...);
var max = cache.Max(...);

Depending on how large your dataset is, this might be the way to go about not hitting your database more than once.