EF code first inserting many rows

Question

I'm using EF code first and I need to insert many rows into a table, a couple of thousand records, I have in a generic list. Just doing a foreach loop and adding each entity to the table and finish with a SaveChanges() takes quite a while.

Is there a bulky way of doing this with EF or code first or should I do SqlCommand or SqlBulkCopy instead? Also, is there something I can switch off in EF code first to make the inserts faster?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You can call SaveChanges() less often.

However, nothing you can do with the EF will approach the performance of something like SqlBulkCopy.