Book Image

Learning SQLite for iOS

By : Gene Da Rocha
Book Image

Learning SQLite for iOS

By: Gene Da Rocha

Overview of this book

The ability to use SQLite with iOS provides a great opportunity to build amazing apps. Apple's iOS SDK provides native support for SQLite databases. This combination offers the potential to create powerful, data-persistent applications. This book starts with the architecture of SQLite database and introduces you to concepts in SQL . You will find yourself equipped to design your own database system, administer it, and maintain it. Further, you will learn how to operate your SQLite databases smoothly using SQL commands. You will be able to extend the functionality of SQLite by using its vast arsenal of C API calls to build some interesting, exciting, new, and intelligent data-driven applications. Understand how Xcode, HTML5, and Phonegap can be used to build a cross-platform modern app which can benefit from all these technologies - all through creating a complete, customizable application skeleton that you can build on for your own apps.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning SQLite for iOS
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Features


As part of its standards, SQLite uses and implements most of the SQL-92 standards, but not all the potential features or parts of functionality are used or realized. For example, SQLite uses and implements most of the SQL-92 standards but not all potent columns. The support for triggers is not 100% as it cannot write output to the views.

As mentioned previously, the use of a common datatype for a column is different; most relational database systems assign them to individual values. SQLite will convert a string to an integer if the column's preferred type is an integer. It is a good piece of functionality when bound to this type of scripting language, but the technique is not portable to other RDBMS systems. It also has its criticisms for not having a good data integrity mechanism compared to others, in relation to statically typed columns.

There are some major differences between the two approaches of data: one is Core Data and the SQLite way Core Data is similar to having a layer of information between the user interface and the database itself. It does have the advantage of speeding up database interactivity read/write process and saves writing huge queries. While SQLite is a local relational database with its own efficiencies and limitations, it may not suit all applications. Sometimes, due to the speed of a device, Core Data may have the advantage of SQLite directly.

Briefly, your application will have model layer objects, and these are held and managed in a framework, namely, Core Data. It manages the life cycle of an object within iOS. This is just some background information to show how data can be read from databases and the speed at which this takes place.