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simonjkendrew
Inspiring
March 25, 2015
Question

AIR desktop app (Windows 7) - Big data set, XML or SQLlite?

  • March 25, 2015
  • 3 replies
  • 547 views

I am developing an AIR desktop application for a Windows 7 touch screen kiosk that needs to access and allow users to search a set of data, which could initially contain anywhere between 17,000 and 100,000 records. Each record could have perhaps 15 to 20 fields, and all the data will be stored locally on the computer, and updated with new data by memory stick, perhaps once per month. The kiosk will not be connected to the internet.

Can anyone offer any advice as to the viability / limitations of using XML, SQLLite, or some other means of data storage, to access this information from an AIR application?

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3 replies

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simonjkendrewAuthor
Inspiring
April 7, 2015

Hi All,

Many thanks for your comments and advice. I have experience with both XML and SQLLite, but both have been used for much smaller / simpler projects. My requirements are for a fairly large database, and therefore I think SQLLite is the solution I should investigate.

Can anyone recommend any good websites / tutorials specifically for SQLLite for ActionScript?

Many thanks,

Simon

D
dogofpavlov
Inspiring
March 31, 2015

I recently had to integrate an app with a set of data with about 850,000 records.

Initially i tried loading the data as JSON and using the native JSON parser in Flash. On Desktop it surprisingly was able to churn through all the data but testing this on a Mobile device was horrible. Even on iphone6+ it took about 20 seconds just to parse the data.

Ended up switching to an SQLLite and it solved all my problems. It was surprising easy to setup and is lightning fast on even old slow android devices.

100% recommend using SQL

    A
    Anonymous
    March 27, 2015

    You can do a general search for XML vs SQLite and find that a good deal of the answers say to go with SQLite for this sort of data set and one of that size. SQLite will probably be faster from an access standpoint but has a lot more overhead on setting up and getting working. XML in AS3, in my opinion of working with it for many years, is definitely easy to work with, especially compared to how other languages implement methods of reading/writing to XML. Have you done any work with either before? Below is a link to an Adobe article on working with SQLite in an AIR application.

    Adobe Flash Platform * Working with local SQL databases in AIR

      J
      John_Hall
      Inspiring
      March 30, 2015

      I'd like to add my vote to SQLite. If you're not careful with XML and don't religiously use System.disposeXML, you can end up with a bunch of loitering objects that will eventually crash the app. Of course, there are a hundred ways to create memory leaks regardless of your approach but dealing with garbage collection with XML is just another pain for me, personally.

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