EnsureCreated() and Migrate() are a pretty confusing combination

The documentation states the following

/// <summary>
/// Ensures that the database for the context exists. If it exists, no action is taken. If it does not
///                 exist then the database and all its schema are created. If the database exists, then no effort is made
///                 to ensure it is compatible with the model for this context.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>
/// True if the database is created, false if it already existed.
/// </returns>
public virtual bool EnsureCreated()

In my thinking this lead to the following code

if (db.Database.EnsureCreated())
{
    log.Info("Database created successfully.");
}
else
{
    db.Database.Migrate();

    log.Info("Database migrated successfully.");
}

And in THEORY this works, but it does not because EnsureCreated() does not do a Migration and populate the __EFMigrationsHistory table. This will lead to all failing consecutive calls to Migrate()

Now this leaves us with two options

• Successfully Create and Migrate a (non)existing database
• Successfully Create a database with non-working migrations

Is this really the intended behavior?

1.0.0-rc1-final + MSSQL Server

[rowanmiller]

You would either call EnsureCreated() or Migrate(). EnsureCreated() is an alternative that completely skips the migrations pipeline and just creates a database that matches you current model. It’s good for unit testing or very early prototyping, when you are happy just to delete and re-create the database when the model changes.

You can just replace all your code with db.Database.Migrate();

[rowanmiller]

Discussed in triage and decided to leave these as they are. The use case for each will be well covered in the documentation.