Realm lazy queries - are they faster than OrmLite? - android

I have recently read inside documentation for Realm database that all of their queries are lazy and I am not sure, if I understand correctly the implications which this may cause.
Let me explain how I understand it and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. The way I see it is that, whenever I am making such command mRealm.where(Customer.class).equalTo(Customer.ID, "someId").findFirst(); I do not get Java object with all filled data, that is contained in db for this customer. Instead queries are made whenever I try to access some fields of this "fetched" object. Therefore I am wondering, if that is faster than OrmLite, if I want to access all of the fields of given class?
Another question related to it. Is it good idea to use Realm db for items which would be displayed in ListView or RecyclerView? If queries are constantly made during scrolling of the list, wouldn't it have serious impact on the performance?
I would be really glad, if someone could explain this to me in more detail.

RealmResults, which are created by our queries, are auto-updating views into the underlying data. You can think of them as type-safe cursors and they have some of the same trade-offs, but unlike Cursors we don't copy data into a CursorWindow so there is no pagination effect. You can access the entire object graph without being worried about reaching a CursorWindow limit.
Most ORM's copy all data into Java heap memory. This can be a potentially very costly operation both time- and memory-wise + you might have a lot of additional data you don't even need. The upside to this is that you do it once, then it is really fast to access the data.
Realm on the other hand, only load the data you actually need. This includes individual fields as well. So if you have a ListView showing 1 field from 10 items we will only load those 10 fields just like an CursorAdapter. It has to load that data from native memory though which is more expensive than reading it from the Java heap.
So to answer you question. Yes, Realm works perfectly fine with ListView.

If you want to know what is faster, try it ;). Probably Realm will be faster, because their propietary system that is more optimized than SQLite, even fine-tuned. But that's my supposition
No, it mustn't have impact in performance, because we are supposing that Realm is smart enough to fetch the real data when appropiate. When using another ORM, it's the same thing, data is fetched when a pagination occurs.

Related

Large String Object in SQLite Database

I have a SQLite database which has a table (of course) named Object. In my application, I need to access that table and all of its fields. I am able to query the database and get all of the information I want from a cursor with no issues. The problem comes with deciding what to do with the cursor next. Right now I am thinking of creating a class called Object and it will have fields for every column in the table which will be set by the query. This just seems so... inefficient. I'm not sure how to do this without needing to write out every column that is in the table for the object to use, which seems to violate DRY. Are there any better ways to do this?
My end goal is to be able to access every row in the table and get whatever information I want for that row. For example I will be using this to populate a ListView. If this is too ambiguous let me know and I'll try to clarify.
Thanks!
Edit: I've found the library db40 and it seems to do what I want. The library seems to be kind of big though (40 mb) for a mobile application. Does anybody have experience with this? Everything I've read seems to indicate it is good. I'll post more if I find information.
Are there any better ways to do this?
This is very "wide" question and depends on personal requirements and what is for developer more comfortable. I'm using your idea that is for me the best one you can use.
Generally we can say you want to create ORM (object-relation mapping). It's very clean and efficient approach (my opinion). Of course sometimes is not the best solution to use ORM ( i never met with this case but heard about it). I almost always use my own defined ORM for sure it takes some time but results are significant against done frameworks.
Both have advantages and disadvantages. Own ORM has much more higher performance because it's designated and optimized for concrete solution (mainly queries etc.).
I suggest you to do what you mentioned -> create object that will represent table in database with properties equal to columns. I'm using this in work and we never had problems with performance or too much battery consumption with our applications.
It's also much more safe if you'll show user some data not directly from database but "copies" in objects. Users can do whatever want with dislayed results (they can add some dangerous symbols and hacks) but now you can easily check this before you'll want to update database(s) with changes.
Your source-code looks good, another developer won't be lost in your code, everything will be clear and easy to do updates for future.
I provided you "my opinion" on this thing so hope it'll help you with make a decision.

Android - Storing fair amounts of data locally, xml/json or SQLite?

Long story short: I'm working on refactoring an old Android project of mine. Previously, it was using serialization, which was painfully slow and, from what I'm reading, a pretty lousy idea in general for Android apps. I'm looking for another way to persist both user-specific data as well and read-only data for the application.
There is going to be a good deal of data on both sides and I'm not sure if there's a "good" way to store it. Basically, the app is a small RPG. There are a number of "maps" that are represented as 2D arrays of Tiles. Each Tile will have a number of attributes, some simple primitives or enums, others additional objects, such as Events, which will also potentially contain various objects, etc. With 400 Tiles in a 20x20 map alone, there's a LOT of data to store. In addition to storing that data, it would need to store a lot of user-specific data, such as which Tiles have been visited, which Events have been successfully run, etc.
I've been examining methods of saving this data out and I just can't seem to settle on something. I guess it boils down to XML or JSON vs SQLite. XML or JSON would be more flexible in terms of future changes, which is good as I want flexibility in the data, ie, adding new attributes to existing objects, adding new objects as the need arises, etc. SQLite isn't as easily malleable as you have to change up the schema, perhaps adjust queries and indexes, etc, but I haven't really used SQLite in the past, so maybe there are some features that help to simplify that process. However, I would also like fast random access to data to avoid loading everything into memory at once if it can be helped. For example, when moving from one map to another, I'd much rather load the next map only when needed rather than having everything held in memory, which is where SQLite would shine as I'd be able to directly query the data rather than traversing a JSON/XML file to find potentially scattered data, ie, we load the map, but Events and objects contained in the Events may not be unique to that map and could easily lie elsewhere in the file or in another file entirely. However, normalizing the data in SQLite would mean a lot of tables and quite a bit of deconstructing/reconstructing of objects.
Writing user data would only occur when the user manually saves the game, so write performance is not a big issue.
I sometimes have a tendency to overanalyze and get hung up on stuff like this. Maybe neither case is necessarily "wrong" and I'm worrying about things that are infinitesimal. Maybe there are other cases that I haven't considered. I've used Hibernate and have considered something like ORMLite to handle a lot of the database nitty-gritty, but that would require a lot of retrofitting, likely much more than what I would need to do for other options.
I'd suggest you use SQLite. I think it makes the most sense considering the amount of data you're trying to store.
As far as your concerns with it not being as flexible, I would argue that point. Just use a ContentProvider. ContentProviders make it pretty easy to update the db schema and queries without affecting your existing functionality. If you use a ContentProvider, you could even swap out persistent data strategies in the future as well as use different ones simultaneously.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-providers.html

Is it fine to use static array as a fixed database to display a list of words?

I'm working on an app for Android that display a list of words..I don't want user to modify the list.
So is it fine to use static array as a fixed database to display a list of words (about 500 words)?
should I use SQLite database ?...what is the advantage ?
Thanks!
As long as you aren't modifying the array of words (its a constant) a static variable should be fine for you.
However, if you're simply storing words I would suggest using SharedPreferences.
Otherwise, if you have bigger plans for this SQLite may be the best way for you to go. The advantage of SQLite is that it will offer a managed and robust way to store and access your data, and its very reliant. Moreover, if you ever wanted to grow your number of words (to hundreds of thousands, say) then SQLite could handle this without a problem.
Using an array seems perfectly fine for what you are doing, using an on-phone SQLite database seems overkill to me. The only reason I could see doing it would be for extensibility later on, if you plan on adding additional functionality later on then the SQLite db may be the way to go(or even abstract it away with a ContentProvider, for even more extensibility, but yet again probably overkill for your needs).

Passing all data from database into arrays as the application starts

My question is not "how?" but "should I?".
I got the app that uses access to database very often. It's money manager basically. It uses data to make calculations, draw a charts and stuff.
I was wondering if the accessing database every ocasion I need some data is efficent way, especially when database grows larger.
Is it a good idea of making class that would read all the database tables into multidimensional arrays for further use of the application? I would read it in a thread with some progress bar if necessary, and then I would have much more efficient way of accesiing datas from arrays right?
Please be gentle with me, as I could be totally wrong here.
I don't think that is a good idea. If your data grows large, you can easily run out of memory. Unless you are sure you wouldn't have that much data, or you need to read them to memory anyway. How much data you are talking about? And how much of them you actually need on the screen?

Best practice for keeping data in memory and database at same time on Android

We're designing an Android app that has a lot of data ("customers", "products", "orders"...), and we don't want to query SQLite every time we need some record. We want to avoid to query the database as most as we can, so we decided to keep certain data always in memory.
Our initial idea is to create two simple classes:
"MemoryRecord": a class that will contain basically an array of objects (string, int, double, datetime, etc...), that are the data from a table record, and all methods to get those data in/out from this array.
"MemoryTable": a class that will contain basically a Map of [Key,MemoryRecord] and all methods to manipulate this Map and insert/update/delete record into/from database.
Those classes will be derived to every kind of table we have in the database. Of course there are other useful methods not listed above, but they are not important at this point.
So, when starting the app, we will load those tables from an SQLite database to memory using those classes, and every time we need to change some data, we will change in memory and post it into the database right after.
But, we want some help/advice from you. Can you suggest something more simple or efficient to implement such a thing? Or maybe some existing classes that already do it for us?
I understand what you guys are trying to show me, and I thank you for that.
But, let's say we have a table with 2000 records, and I will need to list those records. For each one, I have to query other 30 tables (some of them with 1000 records, others with 10 records) to add additional information in the list, and this while it's "flying" (and as you know, we must be very fast at this moment).
Now you'll be going to say: "just build your main query with all those 'joins', and bring all you need in one step. SQLite can be very fast, if your database is well designed, etc...".
OK, but this query will become very complicated and sure, even though SQLite is very fast, it will be "too" slow (2 a 4 seconds, as I confirmed, and this isn't an acceptable time for us).
Another complicator is that, depending on user interaction, we need to "re-query" all records, because the tables involved are not the same, and we have to "re-join" with another set of tables.
So, an alternative is bring only the main records (this will never change, no matter what user does or wants) with no join (this is very fast!) and query the other tables every time we want some data. Note that on the table with 10 records only, we will fetch the same records many and many times. In this case, it is a waste of time, because no matter fast SQLite is, it will always be more expensive to query, cursor, fetch, etc... than just grabbing the record from a kind of "memory cache". I want to make clear that we don't plan to keep all data in memory always, just some tables we query very often.
And we came to the original question: What is the best way to "cache" those records? I really like to focus the discussion on that and not "why do you need to cache data?"
The vast majority of the apps on the platform (contacts, Email, Gmail, calendar, etc.) do not do this. Some of these have extremely complicated database schemas with potentially a large amount of data and do not need to do this. What you are proposing to do is going to cause huge pain for you, with no clear gain.
You should first focus on designing your database and schema to be able to do efficient queries. There are two main reasons I can think of for database access to be slow:
You have really complicated data schemas.
You have a very large amount of data.
If you are going to have a lot of data, you can't afford to keep it all in memory anyway, so this is a dead end. If you have complicated structures, you would benefit in either case with optimizing them to improve performance. In both cases, your database schema is going to be key to good performance.
Actually optimizing the schema can be a bit a of a black art (and I am no expert on it), but some things to look out for are correctly creating indices on rows you will query, designing joins so they will take efficient paths, etc. I am sure there are lots of people who can help you with this area.
You could also try looking at the source of some of the platform's databases to get some ideas of how to design for good performance. For example the Contacts database (especially starting with 2.0) is extremely complicated and has a lot of optimizations to provide good performance on relatively large data and extensible data sets with lots of different kinds of queries.
Update:
Here's a good illustration of how important database optimization is. In Android's media provider database, a newer version of the platform changed the schema significantly to add some new features. The upgrade code to modify an existing media database to the new schema could take 8 minutes or more to execute.
An engineer made an optimization that reduced the upgrade time of a real test database from 8 minutes to 8 seconds. A 60x performance improvement.
What was this optimization?
It was to create a temporary index, at the point of upgrade, on an important column used in the upgrade operations. (And then delete it when done.) So this 60x performance improvement comes even though it also includes the time needed to build an index on one of the columns used during upgrading.
SQLite is one of those things where if you know what you are doing it can be remarkably efficient. And if you don't take care in how you use it, you can end up with wretched performance. It is a safe bet, though, if you are having performance issues with it that you can fix them by improving how you are using SQLite.
The problem with a memory cache is of course that you need to keep it in sync with the database. I've found that querying the database is actually quite fast, and you may be pre-optimizing here. I've done a lot of tests on queries with different data sets and they never take more than 10-20 ms.
It all depends on how you're using the data, of course. ListViews are quite well optimized to handle large numbers of rows (I've tested into the 5000 range with no real issues).
If you are going to stay with the memory cache, you may want have the database notify the cache when it's contents change and then you can update the cache. That way anyone can update the database without knowing about the caching. Also, if you build a ContentProvider over your database, you can use the ContentResolver to notify you of changes if you register using registerContentObserver.

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