I really like EF Core but I feel it's just recently started to hit parity in a lot of areas with EF 6(though it has moved well past in other areas), and it's mi

I really like EF Core but I feel it's just recently started to hit parity in a lot of areas with EF 6(though it has moved well past in other areas), and it's missing odd some stuff that's table stakes these days. Stuff I'd like to see: * Support for "FOR UPDATE" and "SKIP LOCKED"; it's easy enough to tag the queries and modify the SQL in an interceptor though.. Yuck. * Transaction attributes ala Spring; Though I can make do without them it's nice being able to specify what sorta transaction party a method is interested in. * Better support for "bulk updates". SQL Alchemy, as rough an onboarding experience as it is, has really good support for executing db-side update logic. That said, I largely agree with you and nobody should overlook LinqPad. Anyone interested in babysitting the generated SQL should be using it; too bad it's not on Linux :| :( ;( The optimizations they cover in the docs should all be done by default IMHO; optimizing models, polling db contexts, and etc. I also open and close a db connection at app start which further reduced the first request latency after putting a process in rotation.