CODEWITHSUNDEEP
deploymententity-framework-4code-firstdatabase-first
trailmax
trailmax

Reputation: 35116

Code First model and deployment of new versions of the software

I'm looking on Entity Framework at the moment and working with Code First example. So far I can see that the framework does not handle model changes easily: whenever I want to add another field to a class/table, framework drops the entire database and creates it from the scratch.

Similar behaviour I saw in (N)Hibernate. (I could be wrong here, it was long time ago)

That is ok, as long as I work on tutorial. When a real-life project is involved, you can't afford to drop a database every time you need a new field in a table.

Just imagine scenario, you are working on a project with many clients. Every client has their own database. In release 1.0.1 I need to add a new field to one of the tables. If I drop database in my dev environment - not a big deal. (Still, I need to run a script to populate test data every time DB is dropped, and sometimes even this is no viable)

But what do I do when I need to deploy this new version? Make a SQL script to update client's databases without dropping them? then deploy binaries?

But how is this better than doing database mods separate from code changes?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 428

Answers (1)

Leo
Leo

Reputation: 7449

(sorry for my bad english)

This is exactly why Code First Migrations exists. Take a look here (automatic migrations) and here (code-based migrations)

Upvotes: 3

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