Android: how to find SQLITE_MAX_COMPOUND_SELECT

Question

Is there a way to get the value of SQLITE_MAX_COMPOUND_SELECT of a SQLite database on Android? In the C sqlite3 API, this is sqlite3_limit(db, SQLITE_LIMIT_COMPOUND_SELECT, -1), but I don't see this interface exposed in the Android SQLite API.

The reason for this is that I'm inserting thousands of rows, and issuing a batch INSERT statement is faster than many single-row inserts, even when it's wrapped in a transaction. But the max number of rows that can be inserted per statement is limited by SQLITE_MAX_COMPOUND_SELECT, necessitating splitting it into several batches. And, for obvious reasons, I'd rather not hardcode the default limit of 500.

Answer 1

The SQLITE_LIMIT_COMPOUND_SELECT limit is not a means to prevent memory overflow (as least on Android systems), but just a sanity check. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that a vendor will reduce it from its default, so 500 should be safe.

Furthermore, as the number of inserted records in one command gets larger, the incremental speedup will get smaller; e.g., the speedup of going from 5 to 50 records will be larger than the speedup of going from 50 to 500. Therefore, just using 50 should not hurt too much.

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Another way to speed up repeated executions is to use prepared statements, with SQLiteDatabase.compileStatement.