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SQLite Limitations
| By Rich Tretola | January 9, 2009 | |
| 8,997 views |

I am looking for some feedback from anyone who has used SQLite within a large data intensive application (preferable Adobe AIR). If you can leave comments addressing any of the following, that would be greatly appreciated.
How large was the database?
How was performance?
What issues did you run into?
Topics: Adobe AIR | 9 Comments »









January 9th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I use SQLite in AIR for my EarthBrowser app and the database size usually runs from 50MB to 300MB in size. Performance is generally good, AIR rendering is usually the bottleneck. First, the API is cumbersome. But the issue that I have the most problems with have to do with the need to access data immediately (for an inline task) and asynchronously (to reduce latency) at the same time. You can open two connections and segregate the types of calls but immediate calls can fail then.
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January 10th, 2009 at 4:08 am
One AIR app we developed made use of SQLite.
About 20 tables, 10′s thousands rows. As per Matts’s experience, performance generally good.
However, one limitation we ran into was the inability to load SQLite modules. We wanted to add the FTS (full text search) module but found the load command disabled in AIR.
Eg the sql: SELECT load_extension(‘libfts1.dll’);
Errors out as the load_extension function is missing.
This I can see as a problem for other things too. For example you cannot create user defined functions in AIR’s SQLite either. That coupled with no loading of modules is really limiting in more advanced uses.
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Felix Reply:
October 11th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I think the full text search is really important. Don’t understand why it’s not added.
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January 10th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I use it with one of my iPhone apps. A single table with about 80,000 records. ‘Like’ statements seems to be a bit slow, but I think that is a limitation of the hardware not so much the sqllite itself.
Aside from that, I am very happy with it.
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January 16th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I have made a dictionary with Adobe AIR. Two language (English-Turkish), there was more than 98.000 terms, and more than 125.000 explanation for terms. Each explanation has it own field, formulas, signs some other explanation part. The dictionary at total 6.34 MB. Performance was perfect, I could have listed more than 9.000 record with out any problem.
Dictionary had a live-search option, so you could see the new result much as you could type.
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January 20th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
For one of the project, run several READ calls on several tables at the same time can cause crash on Mac, but it works well on Vista.
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March 16th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
It is annoying there is no bulk load in AIR. I am trying apps that insert and remove hundreds of lines. On other platforms it works really well. Why is there no bulk load capability?
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April 21st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Having a tremendous issue with simple joins in SQLite. I have only 10 tables but trying to create a query that will select all the values to be display its turning to be a real pain. If anyone out there has experience with JOINs for 5 tables, please lend a hand. Thanks.
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Tom McQuarrie Reply:
May 8th, 2009 at 1:59 am
I’m having the same issue as Agent RR, only my query is falling over after 4 joins
It’s not actually throwing an sql error, it’s just not returning anything. Anyone overcome this issue?
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