How to Delete and Update Millions of Rows in EF Core Without Loading a Single Entity

This article addresses a common performance disaster in EF Core: loading millions of rows into memory to delete or update them, causing high RAM usage and N+1 database round-trips. It explains the pitfalls of the naive approach and presents modern solutions including EF Core 7+'s native ExecuteUpdate and ExecuteDelete methods, which translate LINQ predicates directly into server-side SQL without loading entities. The article also covers Entity Framework Extensions (EFE) from ZZZ Projects for scenarios where native tools fall short. Aimed at .NET developers, it provides practical, scalable alternatives for batch operations on large datasets, with code examples and performance considerations.