Inside Symbian SQL: A Mobile Developer's Guide to SQLite

Foreword

RICHARD HIPP

Are you skeptical of the benefits of using the Structured Query Language (SQL) and SQLite in a mobile device? I would be if I were 25 years younger and reading this book for the first time. When I first encountered the SQL language two decades ago, I was deeply suspicious of the whole idea. SQL seemed like a complex solution to a simple problem. Wouldn't it be easier to just read and write directly to various disk files (sometimes called a 'pile-of-files' database) and use a simple key-value pair database?

In the years that followed that first encounter, I discovered that the SQL programming language does in fact make many programming tasks much, much easier. As applications grow more complex and use richer content, it becomes important to be able to organize that content in a structured way. The pile-of-files and key-value approaches quickly become unwieldy. Despite its initial complexity, SQL so greatly simplifies the management of complex data sets that it ends up being a huge net simplification. SQL frees the programmer from the drudgery of low-level I/O interactions and allows the developer to focus on user-facing aspects of the application.

A programmer familiar with SQL can often replace hundreds or thousands of lines of low-level I/O code with a single 10-line SQL statement, and in so doing simultaneously scale their productivity and code maintainability. The use of SQL also allows programmers to defer data storage design decisions until late in the design ...