Develop Reference

In Android SQLite, working directly with Cursor is more memory efficient than creating Model Objects?

In most of the Android sample codes, populating a ListView from SQLite database is done in two ways,
Prefetch data to List - Execute query, create Model objects for each row then add it to a List and close the Cursor, then populate ListView with List.
Without List and Model objects - Execute query and populate ListView by following the Cursor using moveToFirst, moveToLast, move, as required.
Now I want to know, which of the above method is more memory efficient, in Android ?

The Cursor approach is more memory efficient:
Suppose you have 1000 entries in your database and you have a ListView which can show 10 entries at the same time. If you create a list at first, you'll have to create 1000 model objects (each of which in turn consists of several objects depending on the number of columns of your table) and the listview creates additional 10 views (actually some more, depending on the layout of the list) for displaying the 10 items. Now when the user scrolls the list, in your Adapter you end up copying data from your model objects to the list item views currently in view.
On the other hand, if you use a CursorAdapter, whenever you have to fill a list item with data, you are provided with the Cursor holding exactly the data for that row and you can simply pick the data of the columns you actually need to be displayed in the list item. No need for creating the 1000 model objects.
From a code readability perspective, a model approach would be better because working with Cursors is quite low level, you'll need to know the names of the columns in the database and so on.

I think you need to use Service or at least Thread/Async so your UI thread will not be blocked. Service is better because people can go to other apps while downloading. You can use BroadcastReceiver to communicate with your running Service.

Listview Adapter with SQLite Query's

I have a quick performance question; I have a ListView adapter which populates the listview and I open my sqlite database and close it at the end of populating the view and I populate some information about the list row from the SQLite database. I have noticed a serious performance hit with doing this mainly when scrolling which makes sense. I'm wondering how I can improve the performance of scrolling. I query the database about 3 times.
Database db = new Database(context);
db.open();
viewHolder.first.setText(db.queryFirst());
viewHolder.second.setText(db.querySecond());
viewHolder.third.setText(db.queryThird());
db.close();
Should I keep a reference to DB as an instance variable and just open and close when I query or how should I go about this?

I'm wondering how I can improve the performance of scrolling. I query the database about 3 times.
I recommend querying the database once for the whole adapter. Currently you are sending three queries for each row and none of them are cached. Reading from the drive is a slow process, Cursors are designed to fetch a large amount of data very efficiently and CursorAdapters are designed to use the least resources possible. Using one Cursor and a CursorAdapter will allow users to scroll without noticing any performance loss.

There is also a library called ORMLite which allows you to manipulate database quite easily and you get back a list, which means you load the array first and you don't have any scrolling performance issue. This in combination with lazy loading sections of the database will allow you to seamlessly increase the performance of the scroll.

pagination in listview

Thanks in advance.
I am developing a Car Review Application, where user can log in and displayed all the review from the Database. All the the data is being stored in MYSQLdatabase first. I am using json to connect to the MYSQLdatabase and SQLiteDatabase. But the problem is that, after log in the application screen huge no. of data is coming from the server and it is being inserted in our SQLite Database.
After that it is being retrieved from database and displayed in the Application Screen in a list view, it is taking a longer time to displayed all the data in list view. In that case, I am using a SimpleCursorAdapter to retrieve all the data from database.
So is there any way like pagination or something like that to make the data retrieval faster.
Please help me by giving some source code.

You can use something like:
Page 1:
SELECT * FROM YOUR_TABLE LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0
Page 2:
SELECT * FROM YOUR_TABLE LIMIT 20 OFFSET 20
Reference: http://sqlite.org/lang_select.html

You can use the concept of Asynchronous tasks along with SimpleCursorAdapters.
"AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class allows to perform background operations and publish results on the UI thread without having to manipulate threads and/or handlers."
Here's what you can do:
1) Retrieve only 1st 10/15 items in the 1st query.
2) Fire another query as a background task, while user is checking out first 10/15 items.
This will certainly make the User experience faster

Using the LIMIT keyword from MYSQL you can achieve pagination.
LIMIT allows you to control the number of rows returned by query:
Example:
to show first 10 records
SELECT * FROM Student LIMIT 10 //for first time
to show rows between 10 and 20
SELECT *FROM Student LIMIT 9, 10 //after showing the records first time
LIMIT works for SQLiteDatabase also

Async task with SimpleCursorList (Android sql select)

I'm relatively new to Android but I just cant google this. I have following situation:
quite large SQL db on android (need to select and load about 2000 records to ListActivity)
I use SimpleCursorAdapter so far BUT... it doesn't allow me to load data asynchronously with AsyncTask (SimpleCursorAdapter has no "add()" as e.g. ArrayAdapter does)
I know how to make it work with ArrayAdapter but then I lose the ID attribute every time the time is clicked and I want to do it the "clean" way and keep the id (not save it some place hidden)
===> For now user has to wait till all db output is parsed into GUI, it takes some time. How can I fix it to make it run faster ? I need something like SimpleCursorAdapter.add(item) or extend it but not sure ...
thnx

You should consider having some pagination mechanism, not loading everything in an ArrayAdapter but better, returning a simpleCursorAdapter with just a subset of size N of your records. When the user will reach the last row, display a button to increase N and refetch the data from your database.

Populating ListView with ORMLite

I need to populate ListView with List of objects returned from my Dao object.
The items get returned after 3 seconds, obviously to much time for the user to wait...
I'm using BaseAdapter as the ListView adapter.
2 questions:
How can get rid of the 3 seconds waiting time? Should I just retrieve the entire list of objects in a seperate worker Thread and display dialog in the meanwhile? Is there any mechanism that allows me to get the first, let's say... 20 records, display them and fetch the rest of the records while the user scrolls down the list?
If I would use cursors, rather than ORMLite, the list would then query the DB as the user scrolls down the list, releasing the objects of the hidden cells and the cells themselves, and not keeping all the objects of the cursor in the memory. How can I achieve this behavior with ORMLite?
I hope I was clear enough, despite the bad English ;)
Thanks.

You might want to load the data in an AsyncTask, and display a ProgressDialog while it loads. Lot of Android apps do this.
Cannot OrmLite return a DataProvider instead of the while list? (I too wanted to look into ORM on Android but the management decided against it "Its slow", but I still badly want it)