This talk will address a common yet critical issue faced by developers using EF Core (including EF Core 9.0) to read large datasets asynchronously. Despite the promise of scalability with async programming, many encounter performance degradation, timeouts, or incomplete data reads when using methods like ToListAsync and FirstOrDefaultAsync in EF Core.

We'll examine the underlying SqlClient library and its internal class, TdsParserStateObject, to understand how it handles asynchronous operations and why it struggles with large data reads. Attendees will gain insights into EF Core's async behavior, potential workarounds, and strategies to optimize performance when working with large datasets.