How to delete and recreate from scratch an existing EF Code First database

I am using EF Code First with EF 5 in VS 2012. I use PM update-database command and I have a simple seed method to fill some tables with sample data.

I would like to delete and recreate my x.mdb. The update history seems to be out of sync. If I comment out all my DBSets in my context, update-database runs with no error but leaves some tables in the DB. As I have no valuable data in the DB it seems to the simplest to reset the all thing.

How can I accomplish this?

Solution 1:

If I'm understanding it right...

If you want to start clean:

1) Manually delete your DB - wherever it is (I'm assuming you have your connection sorted), or empty it, but easier/safer is to delete it all together - as there is system __MigrationHistory table - you need that removed too.

2) Remove all migration files - which are under Migrations - and named like numbers etc. - remove them all,

3) Rebuild your project containing migrations (and the rest) - and make sure your project is set up (configuration) to build automatically (that sometimes may cause problems - but not likely for you),

4) Run Add-Migration Initial again - then Update-Database

Solution 2:

If you worked the correct way to create your migrations by using the command Add-Migration "Name_Of_Migration" then you can do the following to get a clean start (reset, with loss of data, of course):

1. Update-database -TargetMigration:0

   Normally your DB is empty now since the down methods were executed.

2. Update-database

   This will recreate your DB to your current migration

Solution 3:

For EntityFrameworkCore you can use the following:

Update-Database -Migration 0

This will remove all migrations from the database. Then you can use:

Remove-Migration

To remove your migration. Finally you can recreate your migration and apply it to the database.

Add-Migration Initialize
Update-Database

Tested on EFCore v2.1.0

Similarly for the dotnet ef CLI tool:

dotnet ef database update 0 [ --context dbcontextname ]
dotnet ef migrations add Initialize
dotnet ef database update