EF builds EntityCollection, but I (think I) want IQueryable

Question

I have an entity A with a simple navigation property B. For any given instance of A, we expect several related thousand instances of B.

There is no case where I call something like:

foreach(var x in A.B) { ... }

Instead, I'm only interested in doing aggregate operations such as

var statY = A.B.Where(o => o.Property == "Y");
var statZ = A.B.Where(o => o.CreateDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1));

As far as I can tell, EF instantiates thousands of references to B and does these operations in memory. This is because navigation properties use EntityCollection. Instead, I'd like it to perform these queries at the SQL level if possible.

My current hunch is that Navigation Properties may not be the right way to go. I'm not attached to EF, so I am open to other approaches. But I'd be very interested to know the right way to do this under EF if possible.

(I'm using EF4.)

Answer 1

CreateSourceQuery seems to do the trick.

So my examples would now be:

var statY = A.B.CreateSourceQuery().Where(o => o.Property == "Y");
var statZ = A.B.CreateSourceQuery().Where(o => o.CreateDate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1));