Question

does Android have a “best practices” guideline on creating & populating the db/tables programmatically vs. deploying a .db file in assets?

What are the pros/cons of both approaches?

I have a db with big long strings in several columns, and about 50 rows, so writing the insert statements alone would take quite some space. It seems a waste.

Thoughts?

Thanks!
llappall

Answer 1

I’ve just started using SQLite on Android.

The same kind of factors apply in your decisions on this platform as any other.

Scripting and programmatically populating:

• Allows over the wire updates, makes auto updaters easier.
• Scripting your changes makes them easily reproducable
• Takes more initial effort (if you can’t generate the creation script)
• Could lead to versioning issues (not knowing which scripted changes have been applied) and failed scripted updates.

Prepopulating the database and deploying

• Similar level of time required to create and populate but easier through a GUI interface.
• Fixed database versions (though the oness is on you to keep snapshot versions).
• Larger db file sizes to be pulled down over the wire for updates, rather than small scripts.
• Deployment is copy / paste vs script execution.

It’s all preference really, after all, there’s nothing to say you can’t start with a prepopulated database and have it update over the wire via scripts.