Analysis and quantitative comparison of storage, management, and scalability of data in Core Data system in relation to Realm.

Sammanfattning: When developing applications for iOS devices it is very common to use Apple’s own Core Data database system which is a framework handling database persistence for iOS devices among other things, but since there so many different kinds of applications it might not be the best option to use the same database system every time. Realm is another database system for iOS devices, it is very lightweight and a big rival to Core Data. This work was conducted with the goal of finding differences between the database systems Core Data and Realm that might show that one or the other is better used in some cases. The comparison between the systems was divided into two different parts, one theoretical comparison focused on reading and analyzing documentation and development of a test application. The test application tested time of create, read, update and delete operations in relation to increasing number of objects and increased number of properties in each object. The tests on Core Data were made with two different implementations to get the aspect of time difference based on implementation included. The results were fairly similar on the different operations with a slight advantage to Core Data. The big difference was seen in implementation difficulty and usability. The included features in the database system were also considered. Realm included more of commonly used and important features but Core Data gives the user the ability to add most of these in the implementation, this results in a question of user case.