Mobile Development with C#

Using a Local Database

Storing and retrieving data using the filesystem works well for some scenarios, but there are many cases where you might want to leverage the device’s local database to gain access to a more powerful relational data store. The good news is that all three platforms provide local database capabilities. However, unlike the previous example with isolated storage, there’s no standardized way to share all database code across all three platforms. That said, it’s still possible to achieve some code reuse along the way, as the following example will demonstrate.

When working with databases, it’s important to remember the kinds of devices your applications will be running on. For databases used in normal server environments, characteristics like power consumption and processing power are often non-issues, but with mobile devices, they are very significant. Having access to a local database can be a very convenient and powerful tool, but always keep in mind the environment. Even when you’re not working with a database, you should always be conscious of this.

iOS and Android

The iOS and Android platforms each make use of SQLite for databases. SQLite is small relational database system that stores all data for a database in a single file, and is designed to be compact and easily embeddable. As a result, SQLite is widely used in many environments outside of mobile devices as well, including most modern web browsers. Since the database file is independent of the system it ...