Understanding the difference between IQueryable and IEnumerable

When working with EF Core, you have two interfaces available to query the database: IQueryable and IEnumerable. Although these interfaces may seem similar at first glance, they have important differences that can affect your application’s performance. In this section, we will discuss the differences between IQueryable and IEnumerable, how they work, and when to use each of them.

You might be familiar with the IEnumerable interface. The IEnumerable interface is a standard .NET interface that is used to represent a collection of objects. It is used to iterate through the collection. Many .NET collections implement the IEnumerable interface, such as List, Array, Dictionary, and so on. The IEnumerable interface has a single method called GetEnumerator, which returns an IEnumerator object. The IEnumerator object is used to iterate through the collection.

The first difference between IQueryable and IEnumerable is...