If you do any serious form of iOS development, data persistence is something that you are bound to come across sooner rather than later. After all, what good is an app when it does not save your user data and requires you to fill it in again when you start the app again subsequently?

This is where data persistence comes into the scene. As it is, iOS developers have a few options for data persistence ranging from property list, binary format to SQLite, and so on.

As with these options, each has its good and bad points, and when to use each particular method of persistence will depend on your use case. You will also have to write specific code to handle data persistence for SQLite and binary data. Core Data can be used to store data in plist, SQLite, and other formats, which makes it a pretty powerful framework in itself as we will see in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: