Question

I wanted auto completion feature in ipad app. I have a sqlite database of words. On typing letters in a search box i load the keywords in a UItableview. I have used the following select query,

SELECT word from tbl_words where words like a%

When i had few hundred words, every thing worked fine. But when my database grown to have thousands of words, the response is slow. So i made auto completion active only after typing 3 letters. Which gave few number of words yet it is slow.

I looked into sqlite optimization techniques in this SQLite_optimization_FAQ. It suggests to avoid like % to make use of indexing.

I know that i can create index for column using

CREATE INDEX tbl_words ON mytest(words);

Is there anything else i can do to improve performance?. Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

Instead of hitting the database everytime, load the all values into an array and search the array. This will improve the performance.