Over the past few weeks the EF team has been putting together a whitepaper that talks about the performance considerations developers should take when using Entity Framework. Performance is one critical aspect of developing modern applications, and this document will help developers make informed design...

An O/RM, like any layer of abstraction, introduces overhead to data access. In EF 5.0 we have taken steps to reduce this overhead and improve performance. As a result in one of our tests, repeat execution time of the same LINQ query has been reduced by around 6x. We also have an end-to-end application...

Last year we wrote about some performance considerations when using TPT inheritance in the Entity Framework . We are pleased to announce that with the Microsoft Entity Framework June 2011 CTP we have released the first round of improvements, resulting in dramatic improvements in queries against TPT hierarchies...

Today’s release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1 includes several performance and stability improvements for Entity Framework 4.0. MSDN subscribers can download the service pack immediately, and the release will have general availability on Thursday, March 10. Download Service Pack 1 (MSDN Subscribers...

The Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team recently put together some great guidance on managing connections with SQL Azure and EF. They outline common connection issues when working with a cloud database, and show how you can implement your own custom retry policy. You can find the article...

The Entity Framework provides a very powerful way to access data stored in the cloud, particularly in SQL Azure. Over the past month the SQL Azure team has been posting some great info on how to use Entity Framework: Using EF’s Model First capability with SQL Azure This walkthrough shows...

Entity Framework’s Inheritance Mapping allows developers to map their classes to different database structures in order to fulfill their specific performance, extensibility, storage size, and ease of use requirements. This article will help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each...

When considering how your application will connect to a data source, there’s a variety of technologies, patterns, and architectures to consider. Recently we published a “ Summary of Data Access Guidance ” on the MSDN Data Developer Center. If you want to drill deeper into the material...

The Entity Framework offers very rich inheritance mapping schemes for building your conceptual model. The inheritance capabilities in EF include: · TPH (Table per Hierarchy): This is the inheritance scheme where there is a single table in the database representing the hierarchy, but the conceptual...

Background EF4 supports the use of server-generated GUIDs, which has been a popular request since EF 3.5. Lee Dumond summarized his experience on how to use this feature very well. But you may find that the performance of server-generated GUIDs is not as fast as client-side generated GUIDs or even...

If you missed out on all the festivities at TechEd North America in New Orleans last week, be sure to check out www.msteched.com and catch the talks online. All week long there was a ton of excitement about the new features in Entity Framework 4.0 and WCF Data Services/OData and lots of great questions...

In a previous post ( http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/08/05/improvements-to-the-generated-sql-in-net-4-0-beta1.aspx ), we talked about the improvements to the quality and the readability of the SQL generated when querying using the Entity Framework that we made in .NET 4.0 Beta 1. We continued...

There have been a few questions from the last performance blog post about how the Entity Framework compares against other object relational mapping frameworks. The simplest way to compare the performance of Entity Framework with various competing products is to use query performance against SqlClient...

Query Performance During this post I’ll show a few patterns on how to improve the query performance. A major design element for performance is the query cache. Once a query is executed, parts of the query are maintained in a global cache. Because of query and metadata caching, the second run always...

Performance Matters No matter what type of application you are developing at some point in the lifecycle of a software application or service, performance matters; this is especially true when accessing data. In this article, I’m going to spend some time exploring the performance of the ADO.NET Entity...

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1, there are some bug fixes and improvements in ADO.NET (A list of the general fixes is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945757 ) We worked with the CLR team to get improvements like the thread pool improved scalability , and that...

Announcing the release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 ! The ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 release enables users to visually design models and mappings using Visual Studio 2008 RTM and the .NET Framework 3.5 RTM. This release also incorporates fixes to bugs, performance improvements and...

I've been answering a few questions here and there about performance for pulling LOB data out of a SqlDataReader and figured a discussion of what's going on behind the scenes may be useful. This analysis is based primarily on the number of copies and movements of data, as well as a bit of code path inspection...