CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidperformancesqlite
Cethy
Cethy

Reputation: 551

What is faster - Storing data in list or in a database? (Android)

I'm currently working on a project in school (Android application) where we are supposed to store information on the users' expenses and income in a local SQLite database, and then display it as various diagrams, etc.

My question is; What would be faster? Constantly making queries to the database in order to get information on certain expenses, or simply making a query on startup and storing the returned values as objects in a list?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2267

Answers (6)

Imdad
Imdad

Reputation: 769

If you're gonna iterate through the objects/data, then probably best to use a Database to query.

Otherwise, use a List to make it faster and also simple to code.

Upvotes: 0

Daniel Bo
Daniel Bo

Reputation: 2518

It is faster to pull every entry from DB at once and then save it into the List till it is used.

Unless you want to search in those Entries. If you are looking for every Entry that looks like "market" i would search in db and put the result in the list to display it.

Basicly, what you want to avoid is to retrieve every Entry from your Database at exactly the Time, that the ListAdapter calls getView and you need new Data.

Upvotes: 5

Stephen Byrne
Stephen Byrne

Reputation: 7485

The answer is; it depends. If you have only a small number of items in the list, then yes it will almost certainly be faster to pull them at startup; however if there are thousands of items, it might make the application startup much slower (although accessing the individual items will of course be faster).

My advice would be to actually test it and see which approach works best with the data set you have, and make your decision based on empirical evidence.

Upvotes: 2

productioncoder
productioncoder

Reputation: 4335

Accessing a database is expensive. So it would make sense to get all the data out of the DB. If the data is changed, update your database in onStop (this is the place to do clean up work).

Upvotes: 3

rusmus
rusmus

Reputation: 1665

It really depends on the amount of data and the complexity of the queries you need to perform. If you are dealing with thousands of objects, and you need to iterate over the list to check for specific properties on each, it might well be faster to use a database.

Upvotes: 5

Quillion
Quillion

Reputation: 6476

Storing them as list will definitely be faster. Here is a breakdown

If you load data and keep it in list you will always have access to it since it is in the memory and is already in format you want.

If you query every single time then there are three steps involved.
1) Read data from memory (hard drive)
2) Convert it into an object you want
3) Store data in memory (RAM)
4) Read data from memory (RAM)

Too many steps and slower execution as you see

Upvotes: 5

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