iPhone Persistent Store Overview

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:24:18 +0000

Storing information over iPhone apps is a task that needs to be carefully taken and analyzed. We know an iPhone has limited resources that need to be used and released, properly. The problem is: what happens when you have an app that stores and load large amount of data (e.g, a Sales Force Automation Applications)?

We don’t know how the application will respond to these data access with the time (as the database size increases). Moreover, we have lot of third-party options of persistence layer, or layers responsible to manage data access and data mapping to objects.

These third-party options may have other problems that could resulting in performance loss with the time. So, choosing the best for each situation isn’t an easy job.

Thus, I.ndigo has decided to begin a series of performance experiments on the most known options of Persistent Store, and obviously, the Core Data purely implemented.

Searching on the web for options resulted on the following list of technologies:

	Core Data	FMDB	Magical Panda	Mogenerator	OmniDataObjects	iphone-rsdb	SQLite	SQLitePersistentObjects
Abstraction level	object graph manager	SQLite wrapper	ActiveRecord (over Core Data)	object graph manager	Core Data API implementation (over SQLite)	SQLite wrapper (based on fmdb)	-	ActiveRecord over SQLite
belongs_to implementation	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
has_many implementation	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
many_to_many implementation	yes	yes	yes	yes	N/A	no	yes	no
SQL	no	yes	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes
Lazy Loading	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	no	yes	no
License	iPhone Program	MIT	MIT	N/A	MIT	Apache 2.0	Public Domain	New BSD License

This table also shows information about these technologies, which helped us to choose different options to test and compare one another. This table also shows whether there is any license limitation or need for a specific tool, such as SQL implementation.

Next posts will cover a serie of tests executed on some of these technologies and comparisons between them in several scenarios.

Stay tuned!

This post is also available in Portuguese: Visão Geral de iPhone Persistent Store

Indigo » persistence

iPhone Persistent Store Overview