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

Yes, SqlBulkUpdate is indeed the fastest tool for this type of task. I wanted to find "least effort" generic way for me in .NET Core so I ended up using great library from Marc Gravell called FastMember and writing one tiny extension method for entity framework DB context. Works lightning fast:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using FastMember;
using Microsoft.Data.SqlClient;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;

namespace Services.Extensions
{
    public static class DbContextExtensions
    {
        public static void BulkCopyToServer(this DbContext db, IEnumerable collection)
        {
            var messageEntityType = db.Model.FindEntityType(typeof(T));

            var tableName = messageEntityType.GetSchema() + "." + messageEntityType.GetTableName();
            var tableColumnMappings = messageEntityType.GetProperties()
                .ToDictionary(p => p.PropertyInfo.Name, p => p.GetColumnName());

            using (var connection = new SqlConnection(db.Database.GetDbConnection().ConnectionString))
            using (var bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(connection))
            {
                foreach (var (field, column) in tableColumnMappings)
                {
                    bulkCopy.ColumnMappings.Add(field, column);
                }

                using (var reader = ObjectReader.Create(collection, tableColumnMappings.Keys.ToArray()))
                {
                    bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = tableName;
                    connection.Open();
                    bulkCopy.WriteToServer(reader);
                    connection.Close();
                }
            }
        }
    }
}