Entity Framework Core

Entity Framework Core (EF Core) describes itself as "a lightweight, extensible, open source and cross-platform version of the popular Entity Framework data access technology."

EF Core assumes a one-to-one mapping between entity classes and tables. All access is performed via a DbContext class, which internally manages connections and tracks changes to entities.

Supported Databases

Database specific providers are required.

EF Core 3.x supports:

Azure Cosmos DB
MariaDB
MySQL
Oracle DB
PostgreSQL
SQL Server
SQLite

EF Core 2.x providers are not compatible with EF Core 3.x.

Libraries

See Database Providers for a current list of EF Core providers.

Setup

EF Core requires creating a subclass of DbContext. This contains the configuration needed to map classes to tables.

The Scaffold-DbContext command may be used to automatically generate the DBContext and the matching entity classes.

Alternately, the entities can be created first and be used to generate the database schema.

Documentation and Tutorials

Bug Reporting

Issues should be logged in the dotnet/efcore repository.

Licensing

EF Core itself is offered under the Apache License 2.0.

Individual EF Core providers may be licensed differently.