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parek
parek

Reputation: 782

Entity Framework approach for production

We are building this .NET application using Entity Framework as our DB connector. I know all about the stuff of picking the right approach based on your circumstances like "do you have an existing database?", "do you prefer modelling instead of coding". But after some reading I've found that it's not the only thing to think of as the upgrade process of the database when it's already in production is really important, espacially for us.

So which approach is best for production use with Entity Framework. For the moment we have an existing database. I prefer to use the model and update the database from it but then we have lack of functionality in default values of columns and the model can be hard to work with in teams so what we need is basically some best practice here.

For production use: Database First, Model First or Code First?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 225

Answers (1)

danludwig
danludwig

Reputation: 47375

Someone else might chime in here and tell you to use model migrations with the code first approach. That may be a solution, it's just not my preference.

We manage an in-motion database using EF code first, however I would not be able to do it without one hugely beneficial Visual Studio feature: SQL Schema Compare. I believe this feature is only available in the Premium and Ultimate versions of the product.

Each time our model changes, I put 2 copies of the database schema on my local machine: the new version, and the current production version. If you run Schema Compare using the new version as the source and the production version as the target, it will generate a SQL script that you can run against your production db to bring its schema and data in line with the changes.

The SQL it generates often needs some editing before it can be run in production, but it will do a lot of the hard work for you -- disabling constraints, add / drop indexes, and moving data from an old table into a new version of it. It will also warn you of potential issues when changing the schema.

Upvotes: 3

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