What are the best practices for SQLite on Android?

Question

What would be considered the best practices when executing queries on an SQLite database within an Android app?

Is it safe to run inserts, deletes and select queries

Answer 1

My understanding of SQLiteDatabase APIs is that in case you have a multi threaded application, you cannot afford to have more than a 1 SQLiteDatabase object pointing to a single database.

The object definitely can be created but the inserts/updates fail if different threads/processes (too) start using different SQLiteDatabase objects (like how we use in JDBC Connection).

The only solution here is to stick with 1 SQLiteDatabase objects and whenever a startTransaction() is used in more than 1 thread, Android manages the locking across different threads and allows only 1 thread at a time to have exclusive update access.

Also you can do "Reads" from the database and use the same SQLiteDatabase object in a different thread (while another thread writes) and there would never be database corruption i.e "read thread" wouldn't read the data from the database till the "write thread" commits the data although both use the same SQLiteDatabase object.

This is different from how connection object is in JDBC where if you pass around (use the same) the connection object between read and write threads then we would likely be printing uncommitted data too.

In my enterprise application, I try to use conditional checks so that the UI Thread never have to wait, while the BG thread holds the SQLiteDatabase object (exclusively). I try to predict UI Actions and defer BG thread from running for 'x' seconds. Also one can maintain PriorityQueue to manage handing out SQLiteDatabase Connection objects so that the UI Thread gets it first.