Chapter 5
Content Providers
In This Chapter
A primer on databases
Database processing in Android
Sharing data using a content provider
In his introduction to Napalm & Silly Putty (Hyperion Books), George Carlin wrote, “For the next few hundred pages, I will be your content provider.” Carlin was poking fun at business-speak phrases and other phrases that seem artificially lofty or commercially sanitized. Little did he know that a few years later, the introduction to his book would compare him to an Android SDK component.
Databases: From the Stone Age to the Present Day
A database is a place to store lots of data. Nobody’s surprised about that. A database management system is a bunch of software for creating the data, finding the data, and doing other useful things with the data.
Until the mid-1970s, people didn’t agree on the best structure for storing data in a database. Some argued for hierarchical structures, whereas others swore that networked structures were the only way to go. But in the 1970s, Edgar Codd (working at IBM) published papers on relational structures for storing data. Since the mid-1980s, the relational database has been the all-around favorite.
A relational ...
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