EFCore.BulkOperations

Free, MIT-licensed bulk insert/update/delete for EF Core. No commercial license required — ever.

Why EFCore.BulkOperations?

SaveChangesAsync sends one round trip per row, which falls over once you need to insert thousands of entities at a time. Commercial libraries like Z.EntityFramework.Extensions solve this well but require a paid license per developer/server. EFCore.BulkOperations gives you the same core capability — high-throughput bulk insert, plus update/delete — fully free and open source under MIT.

using EFCore.BulkOperations;

await dbContext.BulkInsertAsync(orders);

await dbContext.Orders
    .Where(o => o.Status == OrderStatus.Pending)
    .BulkUpdateAsync(setters => setters.SetProperty(o => o.Status, OrderStatus.Cancelled));

await dbContext.Orders
    .Where(o => o.CreatedAt < cutoff)
    .BulkDeleteAsync();

Install

dotnet add package Swevo.EFCore.BulkOperations

How it works

• BulkInsertAsync — on SQL Server, streams entities straight into SqlBulkCopy (no intermediate DataTable, no per-row SaveChanges round trip). On every other provider (SQLite, InMemory, Npgsql, etc.) it automatically falls back to chunked AddRange + SaveChangesAsync batches with ChangeTracker.Clear() between batches, so the same call works everywhere — just faster on SQL Server.
• BulkUpdateAsync / BulkDeleteAsync — thin, discoverable wrappers around EF Core's native ExecuteUpdateAsync/ExecuteDeleteAsync, rounding out the bulk-operations API surface under one consistent name.
• Database-generated columns (identity primary keys, computed columns) are automatically excluded from the insert payload — set BulkInsertOptions.ExcludeDatabaseGeneratedColumns = false to override.

await dbContext.BulkInsertAsync(orders, new BulkInsertOptions
{
    BatchSize = 5000,
    TimeoutSeconds = 60,
});

Roadmap

• BulkInsertOrUpdateAsync (upsert/merge) is planned for a future 1.1 release. It's deliberately out of scope for 1.0 to ship a well-tested, focused insert/update/delete core first.

Design goals

• MIT licensed, forever. No commercial tier, no per-seat fees.
• Same API everywhere. SQL Server gets SqlBulkCopy performance; every other provider gets a correct, tested fallback — you don't need #if branches in your app code.
• No hard SqlClient dependency at runtime for non-SQL-Server apps — the SQL Server path is only exercised when DbContext.Database.ProviderName reports the SQL Server provider.

Related Packages

Package	Downloads	Description
Swevo.EFCore.Outbox		Transactional outbox pattern for EF Core + AutoBus
Swevo.EFCore.StronglyTyped		Compile-time strongly-typed ID generation for
Swevo.EFCore.SoftDelete		Compile-time soft-delete generation for EF Core entities using Roslyn source generators
Swevo.EFCore.Seeding		Fluent, idempotent, dependency-ordered seed data for EF Core
Swevo.EFCore.Pagination		Offset and cursor-based pagination for EF Core
Swevo.EFCore.JsonColumn		Compile-time JSON column configuration for EF Core 8+ — [JsonColumn] on owned navigation properties generates ConfigureJsonColumns(ModelBuilder) with OwnsOne(
Swevo.EFCore.MultiTenant		Compile-time multi-tenancy for EF Core
Swevo.EFCore.RowVersion		Compile-time optimistic concurrency for EF Core — [Optimistic] source generator adds RowVersion property, IOptimisticEntity, and SaveChangesClientWinsAsync / SaveChangesDatabaseWinsAsync retry extensions

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I'm the author of EFCore.BulkOperations and a suite of compile-time source generators (AutoWire, AutoMap.Generator) and 28+ Polly v8 resilience packages. I'm available for consulting on Polly v8 resilience, Azure cloud architecture, and clean .NET design.

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🌐 Full suite overview: swevo.github.io

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License

MIT © Justin Bannister