With Entity Framework Core 6.0, a planned upgrade to Microsoft’s open source data access technology, the project’s developers are planning for higher performance and the addition of support for SQL Server temporal tables and JSON columns.
Due in November, Entity Framework Core 6.0 would align with and likely target the planned .NET 6 release, according to a bulletin published January 18. Project developers hope to leverage compiled models in Entity Framework Core 6.0 to improve startup performance. Plans also call for improvements to the project’s infrastructure for performance tests and adding new tests.
In addition, the project will continue to investigate making Entity Framework Core work better with linkers and AOT (ahead-of-time) compilation, although the gap is not expected to be closed in the version 6.0 timeframe. Entity Framework Core is positioned as a lightweight, extensible, open source, and cross-platform version of Entity Framework data access technology.
Plans for Entity Framework Core 6.0 also include:
- The ability to create SQL Server temporal tables, which support temporal queries, via migrations. Also, access to historical data would be allowed through LINQ queries.
- Common patterns would be introduced for JSON support that can be implemented via any database provider. Also, JSON column support would be implemented for SQLite and SQL Server.
- For
ColumnAttribute.Order, plans call for allowing arbitrary ordering of columns when creating a table with migrations orEnsureCreated. - Improved support for managing migrations and deploying databases. This includes using migrations bundles to perform Entity Framework Core migrations and improving tools and project/assembly management for migrations.
- Closing of the query gap with Entity Framework 6 and making Entity Framework Core queries a true superset of supported Entity Framework 6 queries.
- An improved experience is planned for value objects.
- Model building conventions would be exposed to applications.