Best advise i have is writing a seeder that seeds data. Technically you could have it pull data from the MSSQL database but personally i would rather just write seeders that seed the data themselves without the need of a dependency on another service.

There are multiple ways to achieve this but as mentioned, you should seed the database. You can write a extension class for the ModelBuilder .

public static class ModelBuilderExtensions
{
    public static void Seed(this ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        modelBuilder.Entity<MyEntity>().HasData(
            new MyEntity
            {
                Id = Guid.NewGuid(),
                Name = "SomeString",
                SomeValue = 3,
                IsSomething = true
            }
        );
    }
}

And within the context class, call the Seed method to populate the database.

public class MyContext: DbContext
{
    public DbSet<MyEntity> MyEntities{ get; set; }

    protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        modelBuilder.Seed();
    }
}

You can read more about data seeding here .