Professional iPhone® and iPad™ Database Application Programming

Chapter 2. The iPhone and iPad Database: SQLite

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating an SQLite database

• Connecting your application to a database and displaying its data

• Running SQL statements against an SQLite database to insert and select data

• Building a database and an iPhone application to view master-detail relationships

As an application developer, you have several options when it comes to storing the data used by your iPhone application. You could use plist files, XML, or plain text. While any of these solutions are acceptable in certain situations, they may not provide the best efficiency for your application. None of these formats allows you to query for specific data quickly, nor do they provide an efficient way to sort your data. If your application is designed to work with a large data set and you would like the ability to query and sort it, you should consider using SQLite.

In the last chapter, you learned how to display a small dataset that was stored in a simple array. As you move on to build more complicated applications, chances are that your data set will grow. Hard-coded arrays will probably not meet the demanding requirements of a more complicated application. You will find as you progress with your iPhone development that you need a data storage solution more robust than a simple array.

In this chapter, you will learn about the database engine that backs many iPhone applications, SQLite. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to build an application that uses SQLite ...