July 11, 2026
Split happens, drama follows
EF Core 11 makes your split queries faster
Your app’s database drama just got cut, and devs are cheering and arguing
TLDR: EF Core 11 speeds up a feature that loads app data in separate steps by cutting out pointless extra work. Developers are happy about the cleanup, but the comments also turned into a debate over whether splitting database requests is really faster in the first place.
A surprisingly juicy fight has broken out over a very nerdy upgrade: EF Core 11 quietly makes a popular database-loading trick faster, and the comment section is acting like someone finally took the trash out after years of pretending not to smell it. The big change, as one delighted commenter put it, is that the system stops dragging useless extra baggage into follow-up queries. In plain English: when an app asks for a blog and its posts, it no longer keeps hauling along unrelated side info it doesn’t actually need. Less clutter, less work, more speed. Developers love a cleanup story, and this one hit hard.
But of course, no tech win arrives without a mini civil war. One camp is celebrating the fix as long-overdue, calling the old behavior "dead weight" that had been slowing things down forever. The other camp is squinting at the hype and asking the awkward question: wait, why is splitting things into multiple trips faster at all? That sparked the classic internet showdown between the "trust the benchmark" crowd and the "show me exactly where the waste is" skeptics. The vibe is part relief, part nitpicking, part classroom debate.
The funniest undertone is that the whole drama boils down to computers doing extra work just to throw the results away — which commenters treated like the software equivalent of carrying five grocery bags home and then realizing four were empty. Even in a small update, the community found room for cheers, confusion, and a little performance-theater panic.
Key Points
- •The article says `AsSplitQuery` avoids row duplication from collection JOINs by issuing separate queries for the root entity and included collections.
- •Before EF Core 11, split child collection queries could still include unnecessary joins to reference navigations and extra `ORDER BY` columns.
- •In the example shown, the query fetching posts unnecessarily joined `BlogType`, even though the blog primary key was sufficient to associate posts with blogs.
- •EF Core 11, starting in preview 3, prunes those reference-navigation joins from collection queries, producing simpler SQL.
- •The article includes a benchmark setup using SQLite and compares EF 10 on .NET 10 with EF 11 on .NET 11, while noting the improvement may not be attributable solely to EF Core.