What risks appear when EF Core retries database operations after a transient failure?

In production I design an explicit recovery path for uncertain commits. Client-generated operation ids and unique constraints can turn a replay into the same logical write; for suitable operations, ExecuteInTransactionAsync can verify whether the intended state exists before deciding to retry. Otherwise I discard the context, reload state through a fresh context, and return an honest unknown-or-conflict outcome for reconciliation. I remember that retry-enabled EF queries may buffer result sets, which can affect memory for large reads. Metrics record retry reason, attempt count, added latency, final outcome, and operations with repeated retries. Retries handle brief provider-recognized faults; they do not excuse slow SQL, excessive timeouts, or a saturated database.