Question

I’ll spend some time writing some (raw) SQL statements in Android (e.g. for creating some tables) and I can only verify that my statements are correct when I try to run the app and check the logs. Seems like a rather complicated way of discovering that I forgot a comma somewhere and I’m thinking there has to be a better way to do this.

So what I would like to do:

• At the very least, I would like to have a way of easily checking that my SQL syntax is correct (like a compile check).

• Ideally I’m wondering what the easiest way to execute and test all my SQL queries is when working with Android. Obviously I could setup my own SQLite instance independent of the Android one and just execute the queries there, but I’m wondering what other solutions people have.

Answer 1

You can use adb shell. Then inside of the shell, you can use sqlite3.

Read this for more details: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html#shellcommands

Here’s a relevant excerpt:

From an adb remote shell, you can use the sqlite3 command-line program to manage SQLite databases created by Android applications. The sqlite3 tool includes many useful commands, such as .dump to print out the contents of a table and .schema to print the SQL CREATE statement for an existing table. The tool also gives you the ability to execute SQLite commands on the fly.

To use sqlite3, enter a remote shell on the emulator instance, as described above, then invoke the tool using the sqlite3 command. Optionally, when invoking sqlite3 you can specify the full path to the database you want to explore. Emulator/device instances store SQLite3 databases in the folder /data/data//databases/.

Also, if you want to see a live demo of a Google engineer doing this exact thing, watch the Writing Zippy Android Apps session from Google I/O 2010 and start watching around the 9:00 mark.