EF Core 7 - Handling deletes

I’m still catching up on all the improvements that come with the release of .NET 7. One thing I noticed is a nice new feature in EF Core 7.

Before EF Core 7 when you want to delete an entity you had to fetch it first. With the new ExecuteDelete (and ExecuteUpdate) method you can execute delete commands (and update commands) directly in the database.

	using (var context = new ExampleContext())
	{
	context.Products
	.Where(p => p.Name.Contains("Playstation"))
	.ExecuteDelete();
	}

view raw EFCore.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Executing the code above will result in the following query:

	DELETE FROM [p]
	FROM [Products] AS [p]
	WHERE [p].[Name] LIKE N'%Playstation%'

view raw Delete.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

As you can see, it generates a SQL statement to delete the entities that match the condition. Exactly what you would expect and without the overhead of loading the entities in memory first. Nice!

Remark: EF Core 7 can be used with .NET 6. So you can start using this feature without having to upgrade to .NET 7 first.

Also keep the following in mind when using the ExecuteDelete method:

• The specific changes to make must be specified explicitly; they are not automatically detected by EF Core.
• Any tracked entities will not be kept in sync.
• Additional commands may need to be sent in the correct order so as not to violate database constraints. For example deleting dependents before a principal can be deleted.