Feature Comparison¶

Features not in EF Core¶

This is a list of features not currently implemented in EF Core that are likely to impact your ability to use it in a given application. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible O/RM features, but the features that we feel have the highest impact on developers.

• Creating a Model

  • Complex/value types are types that do not have a primary key and are used to represent a set of properties on an entity type.
  • Visualizing a model to see a graphical representation of the code-based model.
  • Simple type conversions such as string => xml.
  • Spatial data types such as SQL Server’s geography & geometry.
  • Many-to-many relationships without join entity. You can already model a many-to-many relationship with a join entity, see Relationships for details.
  • Alternate inheritance mapping patterns for relational databases, such as table per type (TPT) and table per concrete type (TPC). Table per hierarchy (TPH) is already supported.

• Querying Data

  • Improved translation to enable more queries to successfully execute, with more logic being evaluated in the database (rather than in-memory).
  • GroupBy translation in particular will move translation of the LINQ GroupBy operator to the database, rather than in-memory.
  • Lazy loading enables navigation properties to be automatically populated from the database when they are accessed.
  • Explicit Loading allows you to trigger population of a navigation property on an entity that was previously loaded from the database.
  • Raw SQL queries for non-model types allows a raw SQL query to be used to populate types that are not part of the model (typically for denormalized view-model data).

• Saving Data

  • Simple command interception provides an easy way to read/write commands before/after they are sent to the database.
  • Missing EntityEntry APIs from EF6.x such as Reload, GetModifiedProperties, GetDatabaseValues etc.
  • Stored procedure mapping allows EF to use stored procedures to persist changes to the database (FromSql already provides good support for using a stored procedure to query, see Raw SQL Queries for details).
  • Connection resiliency automatically retries failed database commands. This is especially useful when connection to SQL Azure, where transient failures are common.

• Database Schema Management

  • Visual Studio wizard for reverse engineer that allows you to visually configure connection, select tables, etc. when creating a model from an existing database.
  • Update model from database allows a model that was previously reverse engineered from the database to be refreshed with changes made to the schema.
  • Seed data allows a set of data to be easily upserted to the database.

Side-by-side comparison¶

The following table compares the features available in EF Core and EF6.x. It is intended to give a high level comparison and does not list every feature, or attempt to give details on possible differences between how the same feature works.

Footnotes:

• ¹ Paid providers are available, unpaid providers are being worked on. The teams working on the unpaid providers have not shared public details of timeline etc.
• ² EF Core is built to work on Xamarin when support for .NET Standard is enabled in Xamarin.