I use Core Data to maintain a persistent store, and the database can grow quite large. My users with larger databases on iPad 1s don’t complete the lightweight migration in time for the process to complete before the app is killed by the iOS for hanging.
What I want to do is every time the server starts up, check to see if the database needs to be migrated (I can’t find a method for this on NSPersistentStoreCoordinator), if it does hold the server startup process until the database is upgraded and display a spinner on screen, then move forward with the server startup process once it is. The best way to do this seems to be to add a – (BOOL) upgradeStoreNeedsUpgrade method in the server startup method, but I can’t find a way to check. I don’t see methods on NSPersistentStoreCoordinator or NSPersistentStore to check the compatibility of a a database at a given URL with a given managed object model.
Is my solution the right way, and if so, how can I check if the managed object model is compatible with the SQLite file at a given URL?
You could try wrapping the core data lightweight migration code in a dispatch block. This should spin it off to a background thread so you can get past the Application Start Watchdog thats probably killing your app. Its either that or you are running the device out of memory.