What database options do I have for the Blackberry?

Question

I notice most of the discussions about Blackberry database options are old, and generally not too informative.

As of today, March 31st, 2010, what is the best, most universally supported, free database option available for Blackberry developers?

I heard SQLite is available for JDE v5, but last I checked, that was still in beta, and I didn't want to commit to developing on a system that is not supported by most of the phones in service. Thing is, I don't see any dates on these claims. For all I know, the announcements I am reading are from 2008.

So, I am still on v 4.7. I need to use a relational DB for the app I am developing, but there aren't many resources for DB handling available - or at least resources that are useful to me. I find a lot of "tutorials" that assume you know everything there is to know about Blackberry development, or Java. But no complete classes or anything. Many of these examples don't even work. Eclipse gives warnings and errors from code copied and pasted from other people's examples.

I can answer any questions that may assist in this case. Hopefully, this thread will help many BB developers in the future.

Answer 1

Depending on the Java dialect supported on your Blackberry version, db4o could also work well for your usecase. It's an object database, quite similar to Perst.

Answer 2

Ok, in case anyone has had similar experiences with this, here is what I have done:

The JAR class path thing was resolved through no help at all from these sites. What I did to get an outside JAR included in my package was to right click the package name in the navigation menu (Eclipse) - then select Build Path - then add libraries. From this I was able to modify an existing library to include the JAR for the perst package.

Now I am able to import org.garret.perst.* We'll see if there are any complications.

Forgive the number of posts, maybe it will help someone else down the way.

Answer 3

Before v5 I don't think there is a native relational database that you can work with on the Blackberry, the closest thing is the Persistant Store API, however I think that there are 3rd party libraries that you can use, like SQL Anywhere.