Inside Symbian SQL: A Mobile Developer's Guide to SQLite

Chapter 9. Using Symbian SQL: Three Case Studies

This chapter presents three case studies that describe the creation of applications that use Symbian SQL. The first case study describes changes to the phonebook application engine within the Symbian platform, known as the contacts model, to migrate from DBMS to Symbian SQL. The contacts model was the first application to use the new database and it enables the most widely used and basic functionality on the phone, managing users' contacts and phone numbers.

The second case study describes the Columbo search service, which provides generic searching facilities across the many types of user generated and managed data on a mobile device. Columbo uses an innovative approach to indexing with a simple but efficient database to store metadata, enabling 'live' incremental searching of user data similar to that found on desktop operating systems.

Finally, there is a discussion of the Symbian Wikipedia application, which was written as a demonstration of the capabilities of Symbian SQL. It uses an SQL database that caches the title and abstract of more than two million Wikipedia entries. Its good performance, through database optimization, provides the phone user with the capability to search the whole of Wikipedia on their Symbian device.

Contacts Model

The Symbian contacts model is an application engine upon which phonebook and contacts applications can be built. The contacts model provides APIs to enable application developers to carry out ...