Is there a good application for managing a SQLite 3 database with BLOB data type?

Question

I want to create and manage a database with images and or audio clips. I know it's not the best idea and I know there are better options, but it's the easiest way to have the data separate from the programming and I'm not the one writing the code. So I need an application that will allow me to edit the database that the application is calling, and the application needs to call random audio or image file. I JUST NEED TO KNOW OF AN SQL EDITOR.

Answer 1

You could use Core Data instead. It uses a SQLite backend, by default. Instead of using BLOBs, you can simply store an NSString* that is a path to the object in the application's Documents folder. When you want to retrieve a stored image or other large binary data object, you can load an NSData* instance from the path value directly. Keeping large files outside the database will give you much better performance.

Answer 2

Super bad idea to put large files in a database, it will kill performance and could well blow away the memory limits an application has. You also cannot stream them out of the database the way you can from the file system.

Instead, consider this approach - as Alex suggested, work with separate files and strings that represent file names. You could put both the database and the files into a single directory, that your coder keeps as a folder reference in XCode - so all content in the folder you change is added to the coding project automatically. Note that if you change any existing file, due to a bug in XCode he'll be required to do a Clean BUild before building again or it will not copy changed assets (mostly a problem for the DB).

Then you can easily use any SQLLite client to maintain the database of filenames and other data. "Base" is a nice standalone app.

I would highly recommend you use some source control system like Git so that you could check in changes and the programmer could get his project updated right away without the confusion of emailing files around.