subject: What Is Linq [print this page] As of today all the application are database related and some of these contain huge data and some contains less and all contains RDBMS databases. LINQ plays important roles in this area. Lot of people doesnt know what linq is. Here in this article I have try to provide some basic what LINQ is and what are its benefits. AS all of us know Microsoft releases a new version of visual studio and name of this version is Orcas. And this version contains all its beautiful features like Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Windows Card Space and last and one which I have defined here is LINQ. Now come to LINQ its a component of Visual Studio which is released in dot net 3.5 framework. LINQ have a series of operator which are basically used to query, apply filter and project data in array, RDBMS, XML and enumerable classes. We can also say LINQ is one of technique that helps to querying on data with .NET languages like vb.net and c#dot net both of which are strongly typed and IntelliSense-aware. With the help of LINQ we can get a rich view of data which is object oriented. It is fast and accurate because it has its own engine to process the query. When we use linq the result it return can also be enumerated. One of most beautiful features is that it takes datasource as an object not as database so it can query any type of datasource. And list of this database contains SQL, XML, Datatable and on ORM Solution. One of silent feature of LINQ is that it can query multiple data source with a single syntax query. We can also use result of one query in second query and it is also possible that one query can be sub clause of another query. Now I will try to define how linq is so powerful. AS all developer knows csharp have intelliSense feature when we doing coding so LINQ also have this feature which really helps in provide syntax highlighting and easy to write accurate queries with less mistakes and faster the writing query on sql store procedure. With the help of LINQ we can easily see the relationship between tables with its hierarchical feature. Another advantage of linq is that we can convert data of one type into another type very easily for example convert SQL data to xml data. Linq also have relational operators for example it have Select, Join, Group, Project, Partition and set operator. We can apply all condition in all typical scenarios while Filtering, Ordering, Grouping and retrieving of data. LINQ is one tool that really makes all types of data accessing so easily and also help to join data from different data source to do operation on data such as data processing operations. One of its most classical feature is that its have common syntax and model to query on different types of data on another hand sql cannot do this. LINQ applies the principles of object-oriented programming to relational data. Another benefit of LINQ is getting in memory object is simple than accessing data from a database or XML file. LINQ also offers compact expressive and intelligible way to manipulating data. LINQ also reduce code length in such a easy way that developer have great advantage of this. With the help of LINQ we can use single enumeration to call database as well as file system. Although I have taken all its features but one drawback is that dont use LINQ where you have small sql queries.
