Entity Framework automatically creates database when it doesn't exist

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Entity Framework automatically creates database when it doesn't exist

Søren Pedersen 21

We have a problem that is unfortunately costing us alot of money. We are using MVC 5 with Entity Framework 6. Our problem is, if we are using a database that doesn't exist, it will create it, but it creates a General Purpose Gen5 database. As we usually use a basic, this is a huge expense. We sometimes doesn't notice this as we have alot of small databases, and our cost skyrockets. Is there a way to change this?

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Answer 1

KalyanChanumolu-MSFT 8,351

@Søren Pedersen Thank you for reaching out.

Unfortunately, you cannot initialize properties like ServiceTier, Database size from EF6.
Are you deploying the database using a release pipeline? Your best bet would be to execute an SQL statement after the deployment depending on the environment

ALTER DATABASE [YourDBName] MODIFY(EDITION = 'Standard', SERVICE_OBJECTIVE = 'S1', MAXSIZE = 20 GB);

EF Core 3.1 has support to configure these while creating the Model

Protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)  
{  
      modelBuilder.HasServiceTier("Standard");  
  
      modelBuilder.HasPerformanceLevel("S1");  

      modelBuilder.HasDatabaseMaxSize("20 GB");  
}

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

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Søren Pedersen 21 Reputation points

2020-09-21T18:40:25.307+00:00

We aren't really deploying our databases, like normal. We have alot of small web apps, and each of those has it's own database.
However when we are developing on a customers application, we make a copy of their database, and work off of that. This, however sometimes creates the mistaken believe that the database was already copied. Sometimes it doesn't exist, and an expensive, empty database, is created. I am looking for a way to change this behaviour, preferably using a setting in Azure.

I would like to either prevent it creating a new database, or atleast prevent it from creating an expensive database.

EF Core 3.1, unfortunately can't help me as it's a .net Framework 4.6 project.
krish-gh 2,331 Reputation points Moderator

2020-09-23T11:34:18.447+00:00

One workaround in EF6 can be to create a custom initializer to overwrite DB creation script as https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/7d7b5cd8-5878-4241-a674-33336010f081/set-service-tiers-when-create-azure-sql-database-from-vs-c-entity-framework?forum=ssdsgetstarted

Unfortunately, EF relies on the default parameters when it creates a new database, and the default in Azure SQL DB is currently to create a Web edition database. You can choose to overwrite the default behavior by creating your own database initializer for EF. That initializer than issues a CREATE DATABASE statement - see the following example which you can easily plug into the BloggingContext tutorial sample code for testing - or simply replace BloggingContext with your DbContext.

https://gist.github.com/krish-gh/5d6ec2967b37e9606a5ada3f7d0a1c3f

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Entity Framework automatically creates database when it doesn't exist

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