EF Core relational specification tests

BlueTusk consumes Microsoft’s provider-facing EF Core relational specification package directly. The package is pinned to the same 10.0.11 version as the provider’s runtime and design dependencies, so an EF upgrade cannot silently move the contract suite independently of the provider.

The executable harness lives in tests/BlueTusk.EntityFrameworkCore.SpecificationTests. It currently adopts these official suites:

• RelationalServiceCollectionExtensionsTestBase: all three provider-service registration, idempotency, isolation, and lifetime contracts;
• MigrationsSqlGeneratorTestBase: all inherited generator cases, including provider-specific golden SQL for PostgreSQL column facets, foreign keys, renames, seed insert/update/delete operations, multiline defaults, sequence restart operations, unsupported store-type diagnostics, and PostGIS spatial literals;
• MigrationsTestBase: 132 passing live schema-evolution and catalogue round-trip contracts covering tables, columns, keys, indexes, sequences, comments, collations, generated columns, JSON mappings, primitive collections, seed data, migration snapshot compilation, and database-model reverse engineering, plus two primitive-collection converter skips declared by EF Core itself. PostgreSQL’s rejection of implicit arbitrary text-to-JSONB casts is asserted explicitly in the three applicable cases rather than skipped;
• RelationalModelBuilderTest: 682 passing offline generic model-building contracts covering non-relationship mappings, primitive-collection element facets, complex types and collections, inheritance, one-to-many, many-to-one, one-to-one, many-to-many, and owned types. The remaining 66 cases retain EF Core’s own #35613 and #31411 skip declarations. This gate found and closed BlueTusk’s missing decimal/numeric array-element mapping;
• DataAnnotationRelationalTestBase: 97 live model, validation, concurrency, transaction, and data-annotation cases;
• CompositeKeyEndToEndTestBase: all three live composite-key cases;
• FieldMappingTestBase: 167 live field, property, relationship, and change-tracking cases;
• WithConstructorsTestBase: 41 live materialization and constructor-binding cases; and
• PropertyValuesRelationalTestBase: 198 passing live current, original, store, inheritance, complex-type, and structural-JSON value cases, plus four skips declared by EF Core itself for its open complex-collection query issue;
• UpdatesRelationalTestBase: all 36 live insert, update, delete, concurrency, generated-value, batching, filtered-index, and identifier-length contracts;
• StoreGeneratedFixupRelationalTestBase: all 119 live temporary-key, generated-key, relationship-fixup, and composite-key contracts; and
• ComplexTypesTrackingRelationalTestBase: 235 passing inherited live tracking, mutation, JSON persistence, and JSON-query contracts, 50 skips declared by EF Core itself for open complex-struct collection scenarios, and one provider regression that recursively verifies every nested JSON scalar has an EF JSON reader/writer;
• ComplexTypeQueryRelationalTestBase: 146 passing live filtering, projection, ordering, grouping, equality, set-operation, optional-navigation, constructor-binding, bulk update, and class/struct complex-type query contracts, plus one skip declared by EF Core itself for its open duplicate complex-projection pushdown issue;
• AdHocComplexTypeQueryRelationalTestBase: all 14 discovered complex-type model and query regressions. Thirteen execute the portable relational contract; the remaining case is an upstream SQL Server-only mapping test scheduled for removal by EF Core and is represented by the same documented PostgreSQL provider no-op as the reference provider; and
• AdHocJsonQueryRelationalTestBase: 61 passing live structural-JSON query, missing/null member, malformed-shape, primitive-array, custom-property-name, entity-splitting, and materialization contracts, plus one skip declared by EF Core for its open JSON primitive-array projection issue. PostgreSQL-specific seed data exercises valid jsonb documents with deliberately missing, null, or structurally incompatible members rather than bypassing those cases.

Without live credentials, the executable gate is 737 passing tests. Discovery also reports 117 static skip declarations owned by EF Core: 65 model-building cases for issue #35613, one model-building case for issue #31411, 50 from its complex-struct collection backlog, and one from its duplicate complex-projection pushdown backlog. No BlueTusk test is skipped to hide a provider failure. Every virtual migration test is overridden because EF Core’s own compliance test fails when a provider inherits a generator case without asserting its generated SQL.

The adopted live gate discovers 1,308 cases: 1,250 pass and 58 cases explicitly skipped by EF Core are reported as skips. Combined with the offline gate, the assembly discovers 2,111 cases: 1,987 pass and 124 retain their upstream skip declarations. The data-annotation fixture follows PostgreSQL provider semantics by overriding the three relational expectations that require a length exception or SQL Server-style rowversion behavior; these are provider-specific no-op assertions, matching the reference PostgreSQL provider’s contract rather than hidden skips.

The 223 complex-type/JSON query cases also run as a focused PostgreSQL 15–19 matrix: each server reports 221 passes and the same two upstream EF skips. The complete official-assembly results are:

PostgreSQL	Passed	Upstream skips	Version-excluded rows	Discovered
15	1,973	124	14	2,097
16	1,973	124	14	2,097
17	1,975	124	12	2,099
18	1,987	124	0	2,111
19	1,987	124	0	2,111

Migration methods whose SQL is not supported by an older server carry explicit server-version discovery conditions: generated-column expression changes run on PostgreSQL 17 and later, while virtual generated-column cases run on PostgreSQL 18 and later. These conditions exclude only the inapplicable parameterized method rows; BlueTusk’s native migration suite continues to run the version-appropriate generated-column cases on every supported server.

Run the gate directly with:

dotnet test tests/BlueTusk.EntityFrameworkCore.SpecificationTests -c Release

Set BLUETUSK_TEST_CONNECTION_STRING to run the live fixtures. The configured role must be able to create and drop databases: each fixture force-drops and recreates its isolated database before seeding it.

$env:BLUETUSK_TEST_CONNECTION_STRING = "Host=localhost;Port=5419;Database=bluetusk_tests;Username=postgres;Password=postgres;SSL Mode=Disable;Channel Binding=Disable"
dotnet test tests/BlueTusk.EntityFrameworkCore.SpecificationTests -c Release

The specification package uses xUnit v2 while BlueTusk’s native tests use xUnit v3. The official suites therefore have a separate test assembly; this prevents duplicate framework types while keeping both assemblies in BlueTusk.slnx. The Visual Studio test adapter discovers and runs both.

This is the adopted official-suite coverage required by BlueTusk’s product specification, not a claim that every test base published in Microsoft’s entire relational specification assembly is inherited. The official 2,111-case gate on PostgreSQL 18 and 19, and the capability-adjusted official gate on 15–17, are paired with BlueTusk’s native 301-case provider project on each PostgreSQL 15–19 server. The latter covers PostgreSQL-specific translations, migrations, catalogue discovery, scaffolding, database lifecycle, and SQL/PGQ. Future EF upgrades must re-run both gates and explicitly review newly published official test bases rather than silently broadening or weakening this boundary.

References: Writing an EF Core database provider, the EF Core 10.0.11 relational specification-test source, and the EF Core repository.