A Notable Entity Framework Performance Eater: Casting nchar to nvarchar under the covers

Brian Sullivan was having a weird query performance problem with one particular EF query and asked about it here on Stackoverflow. Some very knowledgeable people asked all the right questions. It made no sense.

He finally discovered the source of the problem himself.

His code first model defined a string property which SQL Server automatically presumes is an nvarchar. But his database had an varchar. Since these are coercible, Entity Framework decided to coerce the type under the covers. And it was very expensive. Brian fixed the problem by applying a mapping that just said “hey EF, that’s an varchar by the way” and all was well again.

This is one of those awful problems that will be hard to solve and hard to do a web search for. But hopefully the SO question or this blog post will help the next dev coming down the pipe.