Entity Framework Code First vs Database First

Code First vs Database First

When you start learning Entity Framework, you will often see the following two terms;

• Code First
• Database First

What is the difference between Code First and Database First in Entity Framework?

StackOverflow Related Questions

• What is the difference between 'Database First' and 'Code First to Existing Database' in Entity Framework
• Code-first vs Model/Database-first [closed]

Answer

Code First Approach

• Code First is a very popular approach and has full control over the code rather than database activity.
• In this approach, we can do all the database operations from the code and manual changes to the database will be lost and everything depends on the code.
• In this approach, you need to create POCO entities as the data model.

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Database First Approach

• The Database first approach is used when the database is ready then Entity Framework will complete its duty and create POCO entities for you.
• If you already have a designed database and you don't want to make extra effort then you can go with this approach.
• You can modify the database manually and update the model from the database.
• So, we can say, entity framework is able to create your model classes based on tables and columns from a relational database.

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