在不崩溃 LINQ/ADO.NET Entity Framework + SQL 服务器的情况下可以安全地进行哪些架构更改

Question

I am connecting to SQL Server 2016 using LINQ/ADO.NET Entity Framework and I want to make schema changes to my database live in production. The way these changes are made is:

1. Change the schema in the database
2. Deploy a new version of the software that takes advantage of it

What I want to avoid is downtime after 1 is done but before 2 occurs.

In the past sometimes I have had issues where changing the schema will cause ADO.NET Entity Framework/LINQ to die. It seems to do some type of schema validation on startup. In the past I believe this occurred when I deleted an unused field from a table.

So my question is, what types of schema changes are "safe" and "unsafe" to make on the database, such that they do not cause ADO.NET Entity Framework to start throwing errors? Can I add as many fields and tables that I wish with guaranteed safety?

Answer 1

Assuming you don't use EF Migrations, EF won't validate or modify the database schema. And EF always generates queries with explicit column names. So long as you don't modify the table and column names EF expects, or make any EF entity's key property(s) non-unique EF should be fine.