Question

I have been thinking of saving data using dictionaries and arrays etc. Would it not be more efficient to use a database and just read and write to it rather than running through arrays, getting keys and values, blah blah? It will need to hold a lot of text that is it.

How is the database setup and used on the iphone?

Also , if one writes to a database during app runtime does it store? What I mean is that there is no serialization needed etc.?

Answer 1

There is a lot of information on the Apple iPhone developer site about implementing Core Data, the framework for storing stuff in a relational database. Like this introduction.

In fact, there’s also a ton of information on stack overflow about it. I suggest that you read through questions tagged with core data if you’re having a specific problem.

However, I’m not certain that your assumption that core data is faster than serializing NSObjects is correct. There is a lot of overhead in learning how core data works which takes time. Serialization of dictionaries and arrays only requires you to learn a couple methods. It really depends on the needs of your application, I suppose. More information would be useful.

Some more links: Serialization to plist files (NSArray and NSDictionary only) or keyed archiving (for custom NSObject subclasses).