Sqlite on Android - is it stable to use and does it work fast?

Question

I'm asking for a piece of advice. Currently, we are developing android client for out service. Service produces like a lot of dynamic information, and it must be stored on users phone so it can be accessed without connection to the net. On iOS client we achieved this using restKit. On android I found that there is no tool like restKit. So there are 2 options - use sqlite db or cache last json response. I want to use sqlite db, but our android developer sad that it's not stable and slow. Is he right? What practice is better?
The second question is that I found a sqlite editor app, which allows to edit sqlite databases on phone. Is there any way to avoid this?

Answer 1

You can use SQLite because SQLite is capable of being extremely fast. If you are seeing speeds slower than other DB systems such as MySQL or PostGres, then you are not utilizing SQLite to its full potential. Optimizing for speed appears to be the second priority of D. Richard Hipp, the author and maintainer of SQLite. The first is data integrity and verifiability.

The first thing you should know is that most of the time spent by SQLite (and most other DB systems) is on disk access, which is slow compared to memory operations. So the key to optimizing SQLite is to minimize the amount of disk access required. This requires some understanding of when SQLite is accessing information on disk, and why. Because operating systems generally cache open disk files in memory, a carefully tuned use of SQLite can approach the speed of a pure in-memory database.

If you are new to optimization, you must know that the only reliable way to optimize for speed is to measure where time is being spent. Unless you are already familiar with doing this for SQLite, you will often guess wrong. Use quantitative tests on representative examples whenever possible. Unfortunately, reproducibly measuring performance on an application that does disk access isn't trivial. However it is difficult to use cache no doubt cache is fast but its not for large data and data cannot stored on cache for long time. So if you want that user will use your app offline then you should place your data on SQLite in an optimized way. Hope this will help you.

Answer 2

No according to experience SQLite is the most reliable database to use in android device itself. It doesn't have separate server process and it directly read/right to single disk file.

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