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SQLite

Let's talk about SQLite

Issue: 19.5 (September/October 2021)
Author: Vince Du Beau
Author Bio: Vince is an experienced Filemaker developer. He is exploring Xojo as an alternative to Filemaker.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,356
Starting Page Number: 94
Article Number: 19510
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

As veteran of users of Xojo know, SQLite (www.sqlite.org/index.html) is a free, serverless, embedded, relational database. It is ideal for single-user applications. The source code is published in the public domain. SQLite uses a subset of SQL for access. There are several client/server versions of sqlite available such as CubeSQL or Valentina-db. Personally, I would use PostgreSQL if I needed to go that route.

I discovered SQLite when I bought my first Mac and came across REALBasic which had REALSQLdatabase as its native database format.

Administration

It is advisable with any database to have an admin tool handy. This allows you to easily create your database, tables, and fields. Most will let you import and export your data as needed. There are many such tools for SQLite. My favorite is DB Browser for SQLite (sqlitebrowser.org). They use several of the open source licenses for their product such as the GNU GPL. Figure 1 shows the main screen with an open database for an invoice app that I am writing. From the main screen you view the structure of your database. Figure 2 shows the actual data in the database.

You can use a tab to edit the pragmas for your database via checkboxes. A pragma is an SQL extension specific used to modify the operation of the SQLite library or to query the SQLite library for internal (non-table) data. A list of the supported pragmas is available online (www.sqlite.org/pragma.html).

Query Your Database

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