title: What are Independent Associations and Foreign Key Associations?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5281974/code-first-independent-associations-vs-foreign-key-associations">Code First: Independent associations vs. Foreign key associations?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>In EF 4 or EF 5 Code First, what is an "independent association" and what is a "foreign key association", as used <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh949853.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">on MSDN</a> or <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11110802/foreign-key-vs-independent-relationships-is-there-improvement-with-entity-fra">Foreign Key vs. Independent Relationships - is there improvement with Entity Framework 5?</a> (emphasis added): </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>2.4.1 Using Foreign Key Associations to reduce view generation cost</p>
    
    <p>We have seen a number of cases where switching the associations in the
    model from <strong>Independent Associations</strong> to <strong>Foreign Key Associations</strong>
    dramatically improved the time spent in view generation.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So -- now I know which to use.  If only I knew what they were and how one would convert to it!  My question, then, is, how would you define those terms?  What fluent/annotations/conventions invoke each?</p>