Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 52. Offline Data Access with AIR

The flash.data libraries are available as part of Adobe AIR runtime to provide local relational database support. Developers can store data in an embedded database local to the user's machine. Storing data locally is useful for providing offline services to the AIR application, whether it's stored email, music preferences, tabular stock quotes, image metadata, or another service.

Storing this data offline in a relational database that supports most of the ANSI SQL-92 standard provides the ability to access this data using a language most developers are already familiar with whether coming from a desktop or web programming background.

Introduction to SQLite

SQLite is a lightweight (225 KB on OS X, 231KB on Windows), embedded database available on many platforms, from OS X, Windows, and Linux on the desktop to Symbian and iPhone-based mobile devices. And now, it'll be used in your applications that you write with Adobe AIR. It's fully capable of transactions, supporting full ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable) and ensuring that all changes inside a single transaction either occur completely or not at all. And, of course, SQLite supports most of the ANSI SQL-92 standard, so those familiar with writing SELECT, CREATE, DELETE, UPDATE SQL statements will feel right at home working with the SQLite database.

Adobe already uses SQLite in the Lightroom product line to store and maintain users' image libraries. Another popular use is with Mozilla ...