Core Data or... SQLite - sqlite

I'm coming from a Ruby on Rails environment and I'm really spoiled with Active Record there. I did a small proof of concept project using sqlite on the iPhone and I realize even more how much I'm spoiled ;)
For the next application I consider using Core Data (as I believe the way it works will be close to Active Record). My App will provide the user with a lot of data to use (with many related tables) and I intend to update that data on a regular base (each 2-3 months). With sqlite this would be as simple as downloading an sqlite file, is it also that simple using Core Data ?

Core Data is very similar to Active Data Record. The primary difference is that Active Data evolved from SQL store into the application objects code whereas Core Data evolved from the application objects towards a variety of stores. More concisely, Active Data does not work without a SQL store but Core Data works fine with no store of any kind.
As such, Core Data real strength lays in modeling complex relationships between objects. The type of persistent store used (if any) is largely irrelevant. Core Data makes it very easy to link complex models to complex computer and human interfaces.
The flip side is that you have to maintain the integrity of the object graph so you can't batch import the persistent store. You download the data, create managed objects and insert them into persistent store. While this seems complex and slow, it is really not especially compared to downloading an entire store whether you need all the data in it or not.
Even if it is more complex, the ease of integrating Core Data into the rest of the app usually pays off.
If you are thinking about writing and maintaining several iOS apps then it would be worth your time to climb Core Data's learning curve.

SQLite is a persistent store, Core Data is an object graph. They're not exactly the same thing -- though Core Data can live on top of SQLite.
Really it depends on how much data you're going to be storing, and how often you need to look it up in addition to write it. Your update process is going to be a lot more difficult using Core Data than SQLite, especially if you have a lot of data; however, it may be easier to work with for the common case (small updates, reads), which could offset many of these issues.

Related

What is the technical difference between core-data and SQLite and usage?

Can anyone explain me what is the tech difference between them . What
I know about that core data is a wrapper over SQLite and Internally it
uses SQLite.
If Core data Internally uses SQLite then how Core Data is faster then
SQLite and why we use core data in most of the application?
Please explain it with the relevant examples.
SQLite is a database. It fundamentally stores data organized as tables of similar data broken up into rows of individual data items.
CoreData is an object store. It stores an arbitrary graph of many objects and their connections between each other. That it uses SQLite is ancillary to it's real function, it could (and does) just as easily store that graph in an XML file, a property list file, or other arbitrary data formats.
As for why you use CoreData instead of SQLite, it's primarily simplicity. With SQLite you have to deal with reading the rows from the tables and reconstructing individual useful objects. With CoreData, that's all transparently handled for you, as well as a great many other issues like inter-thread synchronization and migration (changes from version to version).

What cache strategy do I need in this case ?

I have what I consider to be a fairly simple application. A service returns some data based on another piece of data. A simple example, given a state name, the service returns the capital city.
All the data resides in a SQL Server 2008 database. The majority of this "static" data will rarely change. It will occassionally need to be updated and, when it does, I have no problem restarting the application to refresh the cache, if implemented.
Some data, which is more "dynamic", will be kept in the same database. This data includes contacts, statistics, etc. and will change more frequently (anywhere from hourly to daily to weekly). This data will be linked to the static data above via foreign keys (just like a SQL JOIN).
My question is, what exactly am I trying to implement here ? and how do I get started doing it ? I know the static data will be cached but I don't know where to start with that. I tried searching but came up with so much stuff and I'm not sure where to start. Recommendations for tutorials would also be appreciated.
You don't need to cache anything until you have a performance problem. Until you have a noticeable problem and have measured your application tiers to determine your database is in fact a bottleneck, which it rarely is, then start looking into caching data. It is always a tradeoff, memory vs CPU vs real time data availability. There is no reason to make your application more complicated than it needs to be just because.
An extremely simple 'win' here (I assume you're using WCF here) would be to use the declarative attribute-based caching mechanism built into the framework. It's easy to set up and manage, but you need to analyze your usage scenarios to make sure it's applied at the right locations to really benefit from it. This article is a good starting point.
Beyond that, I'd recommend looking into one of the many WCF books that deal with higher-level concepts like caching and try to figure out if their implementation patterns are applicable to your design.

Creating Data Access Layer for Small website

I am creating my application in asp.net 3.5. I have to make my Data Access layer, in which I am doing the traditional method of fetching/updating the data. Which is SqlConnection than SQLCommand, than SQLadapter.
Will there be any other way I can create my DAL layer easily.
Specification.
My website is small. Approx 7-10
pages.
Database has around 80
tables.
What I know:
Linq to SQL - I don't want to use it
because I am not fully aware about
the LINQ statement and I need to
develop the application really fast.
[3 days :-( ]. Also, there are 100%
chances that the table structure
will be altered in future.
Enterprise Library: It will take too
much time for me to integrate to my
application.
Any other suggestion to create my data layer, quick ... fast ... and "NOT" dirty.
Thanks in advance.
How about using Codesmith (free version 2.6) to generate a simple set of data access objects off your database? Given the small number of DB objects that you need to model I think this would be a quick and easy way of achieving your goal given the time constraints.
I would have recommended using LINQ to SQL. But, since that is a no from you, only other option I would suggest is Strongly Typed Datasets and Table Adapters generated by Visual Studio. They are old but decent enough to work in any modern application.
They are fast to create. They provide type safety. They are quite flexible for configuration and customization. Since they are generated by Visual Studio, any changes made to database can be easily reflected quickly.
Being a LINQ beginner myself, I would recommend taking the plunge and going with linq-to-sql or entity framework. I cant say for certain without knowing your requirements but theres a good chance taking the time to learn basic linq for this project would speed up development overall.
You may also want to consider SubSonic. It's relatively easy to implement and is fairly intuitive to use. Used it for the first time recently on a small project, and despite some initial configuration problems getting it to work with MySQL, it handled data access pretty well.

ADO.NET Entity Framework or ADO.NET

I'm starting a new project based on ASP.NET and Windows server.
The application is planned to be pretty big and serve large amount of clients pulling and updating high freq. changing data.
I have previously created projects with Linq-To-Sql or with Ado.Net.
My plan for this project is to use VS2010 and the new EF4 framework.
It would be great to hear other
programmers options about development
with Entity Framework
Pros and cons from previous
experience?
Do you think EF4 is ready for
production?
Should i take the risk or just stick with plain old good ADO.NET?
Whether EF4 is really ready for production is a bit hard to say since it's not officially been released yet.... but all the preliminary experiences and reports about it seem to indicate it's quite good.
However: you need to take into consideration what EF is trying to solve; it's a two-layer approach, one layer maps to your physical storage schema in your database (and supports multiple backends), and the second layer is your conceptual model you program against. And of course, there's the need for a mapping between those two layers.
So EF4 is great if you have a large number of tables, if you have multiple backends to support, if you need to be able to map a physical schema to a different conceptual schema, and so forth. It's great for complex enterprise level applications.
BUT that comes at a cost - those extra layers do have an impact on performance, complexity, maintainability. If you need those features, you'll be happy to pay that price, no question. But do you need that??
Sure, you could go back to straight ADO.NET - but do you really want to fiddle around with DataTables, DataRows, and untyped Row["RowName"] constructs again?? REALLY???
So my recommendation would be this:
if you need only SQL Server as your backend
if you have a fairly simple and straightforward mapping of one database table to one entity object in your model
then: use Linq-to-SQL ! Why not?? It's still totally supported by Microsoft in .NET 4 - heck, they even did bugfixes and added a few bits and pieces - it's fast, it's efficient, it's lean and mean - so why not??
My advice is use both. At first I thought I would only use linq to sql and never have to touch ado.net ever again ( what made me happy lol).
Now I am using both because some things linq to sql(and any ORM like EF) can't do. I had to do some mass inserts and I did it first with linq to sql and to do 500 records it took over 6mins(2 mins for validation rules rest was inserting into the db).
I changed it to sql bulk copy and now it is down to 2min and 4 seconds(4 seconds to do all inserts)
But like marc_s said I really did not want to fiddle around with DataTables, DataRows, and untyped Row["RowName"].
Say my table was like 10 columns long and called Table A. What I did was I used linq to sql and made a Table A class( new TableA()) object and populated it with data. I then would pass this object to a method that created the datarow.
So linq to sql saved me some time because I probably would have made a class as I would not have wanted to pass in 10 parameters into the method that makes the data row. I also feel it gives a bit of typeness back as you have to pass in the right object to use that method so less chance of passing in the wrong data.
Finally you can still use linq to sql to call Stored procedures and that is like one line of code.
So I would use both when ever you notice that linq to sql (or in your case EF) is slow then just write a SP and call it through EF. If you need to do straight ado.net evaluate what you need to do maybe you can use EF for most of the code(so you can at least work with objects) and only for that small portion ado.net sort of what I did with sql bulk copy.
EF 4 is now more similar to LINQ to SQL, in the good ways; it has the FK keys right in the object, has add methods right in the object sets, and a lot of other nice features. THe designer is much improved, and the major plus is that it works with SQL and Oracle, and maybe some others (as long as the provider supports it) instead of LINQ to SQL with only SQL Server.
EF is the future; the ADO.NET data services is a web service add on, plus it supports POCO and T4 generation, and any new features will support this (LINQ to SQL is maintenance only, and data sets won't be getting any changes any more).
HTH.

ASP.NET DataSet vs Business Objects / ORM

I'm thinking through data access for an ASP.NET application. Coming from a company that uses a lot of Windows applications with Client Data sets there is a natural dendancy towards a DataSet approach for dealing with data.
I'm more keen on a Business Object approach and I don't like the idea of caching a DataSet in the session then applying an update.
Does anyone have any experience / help to pass on about the pros and cons of both approaches?
You are smart to be thinking of designing a Data Layer in your app. In an ASP.NET application this will help you standardize and pretty dramatically simplify your data access. You will need to learn how to create and use ObjectDataSources but this is quite straightforward.
The other advantage of a data access layer (built using a separate project/DLL) is that it makes Unit testing much simpler. I'd also encourage you to build a Business Layer to do much of the processing of data (the business layer, for example, would be responsible for pulling ObjectDataSources from the DAL to hand to the UI code). Not only does this let you encapsulate your business logic, it improves the testability of the code as well.
You do not want to be caching DataSets (or DAL objects, for that matter) in the session! You will build a Web app so that record modifications work through a Unique ID (or other primary key spec) and feed changes directly to the DAL as they are made. If you were to cache everything you would dramatically reduce the scalability of your app.
Update: Others on this thread are promoting the idea of using ORMs. I would be careful about adopting a full-blown ORM for reasons that I have previously outlined here and here. I do agree, though, that it would be wise to avoid DataSets. In my own work, I make extensive use of DataReaders to fill my ObjectDataSources (which is trivial due to the design of my DAL) and find it to be very efficient.
DataSets can be incredibly inefficient compared even to other ADO.NET objects like DataReaders. I would suggest going towards the BO/ORM route based off what you are saying.
If you're going to follow Microsoft's direction, then the trend is definitely towards LINQ (ORM) vs. DataSets. When DataSets came into being (ASP.NET 1.0), LINQ wasn't even possible. With LINQ you get type-safety and build-in functions to Create / Update / Delete from the database.
Microsoft has even tried to make the transition easier through LINQ to DataSet.
We're about to do a big update to an existing asp app that used DataSet objects heavily; although I am not looking forward to the pain, I am going to insist on going down the BO route. Just the thought of trying to make datasets work now causes me to break out in a sweat.
I think we are going to go down the LINQ route and use lightweight entity objects.
The company where I work makes heavy use of DataSets as well while there is a business layer as well. BL mainly loads datasets from the DB.
I personally dislike this approach. There is also a practice of direct modifying the datasets after load/before save to meet some immediate needs here and there. To me it really violates the idea of business objects but it's how it is done.
ORM frameworks can really save you a great deal of time, especially in enterprise applications with lots of views with similar buttons and operations.
But it's also easy to lose control. Since that point it will slowly be turning into a mess.
Both options are good when used in right cases. Just don't mix them. Decide to do it one way and follow it.
Mark Brittingham's answer is accurate for two tier applications. But what if I want to use a service tier. DataSets are serializable. Typed DataSets save time over hand coding your own objects. Typed DataSets are extendable. Linq to Entities has performace issues, Linq to SQL is now dead. Linq to DataSet will always be an option.
I will use Typed DataSets and a multi-layered architecture to save time and organize code. I've tried hand coded BOs and the extra time and maintenance time is not worth it.

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