What does Microsoft recommend for 2nd level Caching in Entity Framework?

Question

I've used "EF Provider Wrappers" made by Jarek Kowalski. It works fine but I noticed "Limitations and Disclaimers" section where it says:

The providers have not been extensively tested beyond what’s included in the sample code, so you should use them at your own risk.

As with any other sample, Microsoft is not offering any kind of support for it, but if you find bugs or have feature suggestions, please use this blog’s contact form and let me know about them.

I'm little confused here, Does Microsoft really expect developers to use EnityFramework on production websites without any official support (or recommendation) for 2nd level Caching?

Answer 1

There is now a 2nd level cache provider available for EF 6.x

Entity Framework does not currently support caching of query results. A sample EF Caching provider is available for Entity Framework version 5 and earlier but due to changes to the provider model this sample provider does not work with Entity Framework 6 and newer. This project is filling the gap by enabling caching of query results for Entity Framework 6.1 applications.

https://github.com/moozzyk/EFCache

And Redis provider implemented on top of it :

Extends EFCache by adding Redis support

I wanted to add L2 Cache to EF using Redis - there was nothing available at the time.

I found EFCache written by Pawel Kadluczka (moozzyk) over on CodePlex

https://github.com/silentbobbert/EFCache.Redis

Answer 2

Apache Ignite.NET provides a distributed in-memory 2nd level cache for Entity Framework: https://apacheignite-net.readme.io/docs/entity-framework-second-level-cache

Answer 3

There is no official 2nd level cache support. I'm even not sure if EF Provider wrappers are compatible with .NET 4.5. 2nd level cache is in backlog for future versions of EF.

You can also implement your own solution because EF is fully open sourced.

Btw. I have seen dozens of quite complex web sites running in production without any cache ...