Entity Framework bulk insert without holding objects

Question

Is there a way to essentially make the EF context stateless so I can insert a bunch of POCOs and not have them remain in memory, kind of the equivalent of a stateless session in NHibernate? This is to try an improve performance of bulk inserts. I'm going to be inserting 1.7M POCOs into a SQL Server Compact table in the first run, and then inserting/updating records on subsequent runs.

Answer 1

No. EF will require you to load all objects into context (memory) and after that it will insert / update each object in separate roundtrip to database.

Every performance improvement is mostly based on hacking EF and trying to overcome its limitations. In such case you can directly write insert yourselves and batch them to SqlCeCommands manually - you will build such solution faster, it will have better performance and it will be less error prone.