Benefits of Fluent Migrator over EF migrations?

Question

The project currently I'm working on, it has been changed to fluent migrator from EF migrations. What are the benefits of fluent migrator over ef migrations? Is it really worth using over EF migrations?

Answer 1

EF migrations are inherently code-first - you write model first, run ef commands to generate automatic migration and then update the database. No matter how sophisticated, automatic migrations are always problematic. First, things like column renames, dropping unused columns are always problematic. Additionally, if you are using F# record types or C# POCO objects, then to facilitate migrations, you often have to decorate your plain DB entities with migration specific attributes which are not desirable.

Second, EF migrations are not easily package-able as a standalone console app. Packaging migrations into a separate executable app are always a better idea as the consumer of your application would not have worry about knowing the specific commands like entity framework migration commands. Packages like FluentMigrator and DbUp makes it very easy to package into executable. However, it depends on the application needs. For example, if you are building off-the-shelf application like open source Wordpress style blogging engine and if your audience is not well versed with .net core, then migration as a dedicated utility is helpful.

You might want to choose to run ef migrations programmatically but that again is an anti-pattern as in container world, multiple container might yield race condition and needs special care, thus always better to have separate console project for this.