Beginning iOS 5 Application Development

11

Database Storage Using SQLite

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• How to use the SQLite3 database in your Xcode project
• Creating and opening a SQLite3 database
• How to use the various SQLite3 functions to execute SQL strings
• How to use bind variables to insert values into a SQL string
• Bundling a pre-built SQLite database with your application

As you continue on your iOS development journey, you will soon realize that your application needs a way to save data. For example, you may want to save the text that the user is entering into a text field, or, in an RSS application, the last item that the user has read.

For simple applications, you can write the data you want to persist to a text file. For more structured data, you can use a property list. For large and complex data, it is more efficient to store it using a database. The iOS comes with the SQLite3 database library, which you can use to store your data. With your data stored in a database, your application can populate a Table view or store a large amount of data in a structured manner.

NOTE Besides using SQLite for data storage, developers can also use another framework for storage: Core Data. Core Data is part of the Cocoa API, which was first introduced in the iPhone SDK 3.0. It is basically a framework for manipulating data without worrying about the details of storage and retrieval. A discussion of Core Data is beyond ...