Improving bulk insert performance in Entity framework

Question

I want to insert 20000 records in a table by entity framework and it takes about 2 min. Is there any way other than using SP to improve its performance. This is my code:

 foreach (Employees item in sequence)
 {
   t = new Employees ();
   t.Text = item.Text;
   dataContext.Employees.AddObject(t);                  
 }
 dataContext.SaveChanges();

Answer 1

There is opportunity for several improvements (if you are using DbContext):

Set:

yourContext.Configuration.AutoDetectChangesEnabled = false;
yourContext.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = false;

Do SaveChanges() in packages of 100 inserts... or you can try with packages of 1000 items and see the changes in performance.

Since during all this inserts, the context is the same and it is getting bigger, you can rebuild your context object every 1000 inserts. var yourContext = new YourContext(); I think this is the big gain.

Doing this improvements in an importing data process of mine, took it from 7 minutes to 6 seconds.

The actual numbers... could not be 100 or 1000 in your case... try it and tweak it.