Bulk-deleting in LINQ to Entities

Question

Is there any way to bulk-delete a bunch of objects matching a given query in LINQ or LINQ-to-Entities? The only references that I can find are outdated, and it seems silly to iterate over and manually delete all objects I wish to remove.

Answer 1

A while back I wrote a 4 part blog series (Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) covering doing bulk updates (with one command) in the Entity Framework.

While the focus of that series was update, you could definitely use the principles involved to do delete.

So you should be able to write something like this:

var query = from c in ctx.Customers             where c.SalesPerson.Email == "..."             select c;  query.Delete(); 

All you need to do is implement the Delete() extension method. See the post series for hints on how...

Hope this helps