By default LINQ to SQL will automatically create the appropriate SQL expressions for you when you insert/update/delete entities.  For example, if you wrote the LINQ to SQL code below to update some values on a "Product" entity instance:

Figure 13

By default LINQ to SQL would create and execute the appropriate "UPDATE" statement for you when you submitted the changes (I'll cover this more in a later blog post on updates).

You can also optionally define and use custom INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE sprocs instead.  To configure these, just click on an entity class in the LINQ to SQL designer and within its property-grid click the "..." button on the Delete/Insert/Update values, and pick a particular SPROC you've defined instead:

Figure 14

What is nice about changing the above setting is that it is done purely at the mapping layer of LINQ to SQL - which means the update code I showed earlier continues to work with no modifications required.  This avoids developers using a LINQ to SQL data model from having to change code even if they later decide to put in a custom SPROC optimization later.