Fastest Way of Inserting in Entity Framework

Question

I\'m looking for the fastest way of inserting into Entity Framework.

I\'m asking this because of the scenario where you have an active TransactionScope a

Answer 1

As other people have said SqlBulkCopy is the way to do it if you want really good insert performance.

It's a bit cumbersome to implement but there are libraries that can help you with it. There are a few out there but I will shamelesslyplug my own library this time: https://github.com/MikaelEliasson/EntityFramework.Utilities#batch-insert-entities

The only code you would need is:

 using (var db = new YourDbContext())
 {
     EFBatchOperation.For(db, db.BlogPosts).InsertAll(list);
 }

So how much faster is it? Very hard to say because it depends on so many factors, computer performance, network, object size etc etc. The performance tests I've made suggests 25k entities can be inserted at around 10s the standard way on localhost IF you optimize your EF configuration like mentioned in the other answers. With EFUtilities that takes about 300ms. Even more interesting is that I have saved around 3 millions entities in under 15 seconds using this method, averaging around 200k entities per second.

The one problem is ofcourse if you need to insert releated data. This can be done efficently into sql server using the method above but it requires you to have an Id generation strategy that let you generate id's in the app-code for the parent so you can set the foreign keys. This can be done using GUIDs or something like HiLo id generation.