Entity Framework Extensions EF Extensions for EF Core 7 - What is New?

EF Core 7 was finally released on November 8, 2022, along with some new features and confusion.

Entity Framework Extensions officially start to support EF Core 7 starting from v7.17.0.0

If you are confused with our versioning, please refer to EFCore-Pinned Versioning convention.

EF Core 7 and Bulk Insert

Through the year, multiple improvements have been made to our EF Core Bulk Insert method and also other BulkExtensions methods such as:

• Major IncludeGraph revamp (better performance with less memory usage) (v7.100.0)
• Added QueryHint option for SQL Server (v7.21.1)
• Removed Newtonsoft.Json dependency (v7.20.0)
• Performance Improvement for Owned and Shadow value (v7.18.3)
• Added support to TPC (v7.18.1)
• Added support to entity type with nullable owned types (v7.17.0)

And many more.

Even with all those improvements, we always make sure that our library stays easy to use for everyone:

// Easy to use
context.BulkInsert(customers);

// Easy to customize
context.BulkInsert(invoices, options => options.IncludeGraph = true);

EF Core 7 now supports Bulk Update and Bulk Delete, oh really?

EF Core 7 added A LOT of confusion by marketing their newly ExecuteUpdate and ExecuteDelete as being a BulkUpdate and BulkDelete which is not. Even their documentation doesn't mention the word Bulk once...

But what exactly do these two new methods do?

• The ExecuteUpdate is similar to our UpdateFromQuery method that allows to update rows directly in the database using a query.
• The ExecuteDelete is similar to our DeleteFromQuery method that allows to delete rows directly in the database using a query.

You can feel free to use either our method or Microsoft method to achieve this behavior. While being very similar, they have a few differences, such as the way they specify property values to update.

So, in other words, they don't cover at all or have anything in common with our BulkUpdate and BulkDelete methods:

• BulkUpdate: Update in bulk all rows that match your entities list (so every entity can have different values).
• BulkDelete: Delete in bulk all rows that match your entities list.

So be careful when seeing that EF Core supports bulk operations, as a lot of articles and videos will use those big SEO keywords, adding even more confusion.

Conclusion

EF Core 7 is a big success for the Microsoft Team. They worked hard indeed to add support for TPC (Table Per Hierarchy), which we believe was the hardest inheritance to add and to improve the performance overall. The only negative point was to promote their 2 new methods as BulkUpdate and BulkDelete.

As for ZZZ Projects, making sure that Entity Framework Extensions support EF Core 7 was also a big challenge as we kept learning new features that we were not even aware were supported. However, our library is improving daily, making it the most advanced and customizable library for bulk operations.