Use CoreData or SQLite on iPhone?

iphone ios sqlite core-data
Hauke picture Hauke · Aug 23, 2009 · Viewed 34.8k times · Source

Since CoreData has become available for the iPhone in OS 3.0, is it meant to be the answer to data persistence and replace all need for direct SQLite?

What reasons exist to still use SQLite? What are advantages/disadvantages of SQLite vs. CoreData?

Answer

Brad Larson picture Brad Larson · Aug 23, 2009

This is a common question here:

In summary, Core Data can greatly simplify your code, particularly for complex object models. You get undo / redo support almost for free with it. It also provides some very significant performance benefits, particularly on the iPhone. Even though it seems counterintuitive, given how much overhead you'd think the framework has, in most cases you can beat the performance of hand-tuned SQLite using Core Data. On the iPhone, it does a great job of batching fetches to minimize memory usage.

The one downside, as pointed out, is that this limits you by requiring iPhone OS 3.0 for your end users. However, this has not been a problem at all for my users, and will only become less of one going forward.

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