Today I was asked a question by a developer on my team. The question is “How do you select MAX value for a column in a table with LINQ To SQL?”. I will try to answer the question in this post with an example. Let’s say that we want to retrieve maximum unit price from Products table in Northwind database. In T-SQL such a query can be written like this.

SELECT MAX(UnitPrice)
FROM products

Query above produces the correct result.

In LINQ To SQL we can write the following query

(from p in Products select (p.UnitPrice)).Max()  

which will get translated into this T-SQL.

Other than MAX we can also use other aggregates such as MIN, SUM etc..