Fun with SQLite3 and Base v1.1
This morning I decided to do a little digging into SQLite3 after thinking about CoreData more and talking to a friend who uses it a lot at his Shop. Interestingly, it's a file-based database system, much like MySQL, but in this case, they update the database only once - at night, and then it's read-only all day long. Because it's a file-based database, it's going to be very fast to get the data out of it. Sure, there will be limitations - like I can't really do foreign keys - yet, but they say they are working on it.
But it's got stored procedures, triggers, and C/C++ extensibility. So there's a lot there to like - considering it's the basis of CoreData. So the engineers at Apple must have seen something in it, and my friend says it's rock-solid and "just works". So I started digging.
The command-line interface, sqlite3 is nice - very similar to other tools in this genre, but I have to say that the output of simple requests like select * from person are a lot nicer in PostgreSQL than SQLite3, but there's a ton of flexibility in the output format in SQLite3, I could just be missing it.
I happened across a neat tool - Base, that is a Mac GUI to SQLite3 databases. It's clean, fast, and at v1.1, it's got a lot of room for improvement. I'm hoping that they add a few things - like preferences for the fonts in the table views, and the ability to re-arrange the columns on the data and SQL output panes. It's got a lot of promise, so I registered it to at least support them in their efforts.
So I'll see what I can do with SQLite3 - I'm thinking there's an app in here waiting for me to write. Not sure yet, but it is nice and fast, and dovetails with CoreData so nicely... it seems a waste to miss this opportunity. Feels right... we'll see what I dig up.