How harmful are navigational properties (EF)?

Question

ASP.NET

Hello everyone, is it worth using navigation properties to add related data to the database, or can it be done in another way? I read that each call to the navigation property generates a new query to the database.

Answer 1

Use it unequivocally, but prudently. Everything strongly depends on the task, but:
- if the related data is definitely needed, then it can be loaded with one request (see .Include(...));
- with lazy loading, the request will be _only_ when accessing the property, but if you do not use include, then this is a request anyway;
- probably we are talking about code first, do not forget about indexes (fluent api)
- if everything gets bad, you can always use views (including materialized ones) or direct queries