SpurData Blog

This post is really about the cons of Entity Framework. I know, I know, it's sacrilege to not be in love with EF and using it everywhere, and I feel I am taking some professional risk expressing these thoughts. But I actually find Entity Framework to be problematic in many ways, both technologically and philosophically, and I am frustrated that it is now the "standard" way to do data access in Microsoft land. To be the standard implies "generally suitable for most applications", which in my experience, Entity Framework is not.

Here's a script to generate alter column statements for all the audit fields in your database. In this case we are wanting to convert all the integer columns to varchar. select 'alter table ' + TABLE_NAME + ' alter column ' + COLUMN_NAME + ' varchar(50) null;' from INFORMATION_SCHEMA . COLUMNS where COLUMN_NAME in ( 'InsertedBy' , 'UpdatedBy' ) and DATA_TYPE = 'int' Quick review of Alter Table Alter Column available at SQL Server Planet: http://sqlserverplanet.com/ddl/alter-table-alter-column

I learned something about T-SQL variable scoping that I did not previously recognize. Within a loop, you can declare a variable. When you run the loop, things function fine - you don't get any "hey, you already declared that variable" errors. In my mind that means the variable must be locally scoped to the loop, and perhaps would get reset on each pass through the loop then.  But that's not quite the case. Try this and look at the output. It's only instantiating the variable on the first pass. Works the same on table variables, which is what I was actually curious about...