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What's missing in EF Core Migrations? Announcing Atlas v0.26

· 6 min read
Rotem Tamir
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone,

It's been about a month since our last release, and we're excited to announce that Atlas v0.26 is now available! In this release we are happy to introduce a new feature that has been requested by many of you: support for Entity Framework Core. As part of our ever going effort to improve the quality and coverage of our documentation, we have published a set of guides on testing database schemas and migrations as well as a new GORM Portal.

Additionally, we have published an official "Supported Version Policy" and made some changes to our EULA, described below.

To download and install the latest release of the Atlas CLI, simply run the following in your terminal:

curl -sSf https://atlasgo.sh | sh

What's missing in EF Core Migrations?​

EF Core is the most popular ORM used in the .NET community, supported by Microsoft. EF Core allows users to manage their database schemas using its migrations. EF Core's migrations have long been a popular and reliable choice for managing database schema changes in the C# ecosystem.

However, EF Core migrations have lacks some capabilities can make them difficult to work with:

  1. Support for advanced database features. Like many ORMs, EF Core is designed to be database-agnostic, which means it does not support all the features of every database it can connect to. This can make it difficult to use and manage database features such as triggers, stored procedures, Row-level security and custom data types.
  2. Testing migrations. Migrations are typically considered the most risky part of a deployment. Therefore, automatically verifying they are safe and correct is paramount. Like most ORMs, EF Core does not provide a way to automatically test migrations.
  3. Production Grade Declarative Flow. EF Core supports a very basic declarative flow name EnsureCreated that can be used to create the database without specifying migrations. However, as the documentation warns, this method should not be used in production. For teams that want to adapt a "Terraform-for-databases" approach, this can be a blocker.
  4. Integration with modern CI/CD pipelines. EF Core migrations are typically run using the dotnet ef command line tool. Migrations should be integrated into the software delivery pipeline to ensure that the database schema is always in sync with the application code. This can be difficult to achieve with EF Core migrations.

Atlas and EF Core Migrations​

Atlas is a database schema as code tool that allows developers to inspect, plan, test, and execute schema changes to their database. Atlas can be used to replace EF Core migrations with a more modern DevOps approach.

Comparing Atlas to EF Core migrations:

  • Loading Core Models. Similarly to EF Core migrations, Atlas can load the schema of an EF Core project. EF Core users can keep using the EF Core models as the source of truth for their database schema. Using the Atlas EF Core Provider, Atlas can load the schema of an EF Core project and use it as the source of truth for the database schema.

  • Composing schemas. Atlas can compose schemas from multiple sources, including EF Core models, SQL files, and external schema datasources. This enables users to natively declare schemas that layer advanced database features (such as views, triggers) as part of the schema source of truth which is not possible with EF Core.

  • Automatic planning. Similarly to EF Core migrations, with its "versioned migrations" workflow, Atlas can automatically plan schema migrations by diffing the data model with the migration directory.

  • Declarative flow. Atlas supports a declarative flow that can be used to create the database schema from scratch without using migrations. This is useful for teams that want to adapt a "Terraform-for-databases" approach.

  • Testing migrations. Atlas can automatically lint and test migrations to ensure they are safe and correct. Using this capability teams can reduce the risk of deploying migrations to production.

  • Integration with CI/CD pipelines. Atlas can be integrated into modern CI/CD pipelines using native integrations with popular CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Terraform, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and more.

Getting Started with Atlas + EF Core​

As part of this version, we are happy to release the Atlas EF Core Provider.

To get started with Atlas and EF Core, head over to the Official Guide.

New GORM Portal​

Over the past year, we have seen a significant increase in the number of users using GORM with Atlas. To better support GORM users in the Atlas ecosystem, we have launched a new documentation portal that provides guides, tutorials, and examples for using GORM with Atlas.

You can find the new GORM portal here.

Testing Database Schemas and Migrations​

Since starting Atlas, it has been Ariel and my belief that accurate and thorough documentation is essential for the success of any software project targeted at developers. To that end, our team has been working hard to improve the quality and coverage of our documentation covering one of the most important aspects of working with Database Schema-as-Code: Testing.

As part of this set of guides you can find:

Supported Version Policy​

To ensure the best performance, security and compatibility, the Atlas team will only support the three most recent minor versions of the CLI. For example, if the latest version is v0.26, the supported versions will be v0.25 and v0.24 (in addition to any patch releases and the "canary" release which is built twice a day).

As part of our this policy, binaries for versions that were published more than 6 months ago will be removed from the CDN and Docker Hub.

EULA Changes​

The standard Atlas binary is provided under the Atlas EULA. We have recently made some changes to the EULA to reflect new data privacy considerations described in our CLI Data Privacy document. As part of these changes Atlas may collect anonymous telemetry (aggregated, anonymized, non-personal) data to help us improve the product. If you wish to opt-out of telemetry, you may set the ATLAS_NO_ANON_TELEMETRY environment variable to true.

The updated EULA can be found here.

Wrapping Up​

That's all for this release! We hope you try out (and enjoy) all of these new features and find them useful. Stay tuned for our next release which is going to include some exciting new features around declarative flows and database schema observability.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on our Discord server.