Eager Loading vs Lazy Loading vs Explicit Loading

Eager Loading

With Eager Loading, all the data is retrieved in a single query, which can then be cached to improve the Application performance. With Eager Loading, we are trading memory consumption for the database round trips.

Lazy Loading

With Lazy Loading, we only retrieve just the amount of data, which we need in a single query. When we need more data related to the initial data, additional queries are issued to the database. This means there are several round trips between the Application Server and the database Server. In general, these database round trips are very often the major performance bottleneck in most Applications. Lesser the round trips, better will be the performance.

Explicit Loading

Explicit loading is similar to lazy loading, except that: you explicitly retrieve the related data in code; it doesn’t happen automatically when you access a navigation property. in other words, Related entities are only loaded when you say “Load!”. The Explicit Loading is typically more efficient when you need the related data for all retrieved rows of the primary table. Explicit Loading would be a good practice to reduce further SQL queries.