efcore-patterns

Use this skill when: Configure your DbContext to disable change tracking by default. This improves performance for read-heavy workloads. Read-only queries work normally: Writes require explicit handling: CRITICAL: Always use EF Core CLI commands to manage migrations. Never: Separate migration execution from your main application using a dedicated migration service. This ensures: Always use CreateExecutionStrategy() for operations that might fail transiently: Important: You cannot use CreateExecutionStrategy() with user-initiated transactions. If you need transactions with retry: For bulk operations, use EF Core 7+ ExecuteUpdateAsync and ExecuteDeleteAsync instead of loading entities: When you load multiple navigation collections via Include() , EF Core generates a single query that can cause cartesian explosion. If you have 10 orders with 10 items each, you get 100 rows instead of 10 + 10. Enable query splitting globally in your DbContext configuration: Use single query when you know it's more efficient: Recommendation : Default to SplitQuery globally, override with AsSingleQuery() for specific queries where single-query is known to be better.