Stop automatic migrations when I deploy to production

Question

I have a linq to entities application that was working great until someone tried to add a column to a database table.

I was quite surprised to see that the production application crashed because it wanted to run to automatic migration and delete the column. It stopped due to potential dataloss.

How can I have my application run and not try to sync the database up? I would like older versions of my linq to entities code first applications to run alongside the newer versions if the database changes are not breaking changes.

Answer 1

In production, you could...

• Use SetInitializer<YourContext>(null) on startup or...

• Disable database initialization using the configuration file

  <contexts> 
    <context type="Namespace.MyContext, MyAssembly"
             disableDatabaseInitialization="true" /> 
  </contexts>
  

Either way, automatic migrations would be disabled (as would the __MigrationsHistory/metadata check...I think).