should xml or sqlite3 be used?

I just started iOS development am currently developing an application that just reads data from a server and displays it onto the screen. What I am not sure of is wheth开发者_Go百科er to use XML or sqlite3 to store the data. Which method should be more preferred and why? thanks in advance.

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It is important to remember they are two different things, suited to different tasks. Choose the one that fits the problem. (In this case I would likely use XML or "just plain text" because it sounds like just a simple download-cache. Either the raw response could be kept or, perhaps the data already transformed into objects and then automatically serialized into XML or whatnot. In any case, keep it simple.)

XML is (at the very core) a markup format. XML documents are a (hopefully well-defined) structure. There is a large set of tooling that supports manipulation and querying within a hierarchical "document" model. I use XML a good bit for a serialization format and also use it for local caching if appropriate (e.g. there are no non-hierarchical relationships). XML is often loaded entirely into memory (e.g. a DOM) for manipulation.

SQLite is a relational database that is designed around tables and relationships between sets of tables. Being able to run (complex) queries is where a relational database really shines. SQLite is also very fast and can process large data-sets which can't all fit in memory. Columns in SQLite can also contain text (read: XML) so the approaches are not orthogonal.

Happy coding.

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Probably all depends on how data is processed after it was stored. If data must be sorted, uses specific selection etc. then, sqlite is better solution. Second, not so important, concern is how much data will be stored, if it's just one "table" with 10 rows then sqlite is probably too much for it.

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If you want to read data from server and want to display on screen and don't need to save it locally then use XML.

If you want to store it locally and don't want to fetch from server then use XML files or sqlite database in your project.

If you want to fetch from server and also to store it locally then first use XML to fetch data and then use sqlite to store it locally.

and look at @pst answer for what is the difference between them.