Getting started with android-sqlite

Remarks#

The SQLite library itself has only a C API; to make it accessible from Java, the Android framework wraps this with the android.database.sqlite package. The most important classes are SQLiteDatabase and SQLiteOpenHelper.

The android.database package contains the database-related parts of the framework that are not SQLite specific.

Versions#

API Level

API Level	Platform Version	Name	Release Date
1	1.0	Base	2008-09-23
5	2.0	Eclair	2009-10-26
8	2.2	Froyo	2010-05-20
11	3.0	Honeycomb	2011-02-22
16	4.1	Jelly Bean	2012-07-09
19	4.4	Kitkat	2013-10-31
23	6.0	Marshmallow	2015-10-05

Basic usage

To include a database in your app, you typically derive a class from SQLiteOpenHelper:

public class HelloDBHelper extends SQLiteOpenHelper {
    private static final int DATABASE_VERSION = 1;
    private static final int DATABASE_NAME = "hello";

    HelloDBHelper(Context context) {
        super(context, DATABASE_NAME, null, DATABASE_VERSION);
    }

    @Override
    public void onCreate(SQLiteDatabase db) {
        db.execSQL("CREATE TABLE ...");
        ...
    }
}

This helper class is responsible for opening (and creating/updating, if needed) the database. Use it to get an SQLiteDatabase object to access the data:

SQLiteDatabase db = helper.getReadableDatabase();
Cursor c = db.query(...);
while (c.moveToNext()) {
    String name = c.getString(0);
    ...
}

SQLiteDatabase db = helper.getWritableDatabase();
ContentValues cv = new ContentValues();
cv.put("column", value);
...
db.insertOrThrow("table", null, cv);