Managing SQLite Connections in Android

Question

I have a (hopefully) quick question regarding handling SQLite database connections in Android. I have an app that is composed, naturally, of several activities. I have no trouble creating/updating/querying the database, as I've created a single, dedicated class to handle that work via SQLiteOpenHelper, etc.

My question is this: since these activities all share this same database, is this usually implemented as a single, static member, or should each activity own its own connection? My concern of course is the cost of re-connecting to the database in each activity.

Or, put another way, is there any reason not to just store a singleton instance?

I'm also wondering if there's something going on behind the scenes similar to .NET's connection pooling to reduce the cost of opening connections.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Connection opening in SQLite is about 0.2ms.

The best practice tells us to open and close the connection each time we need one.

Answer 2

Just use SQLiteOpenHelper.getReadableDatabase() and SQLiteOpenHelper.getWriteableDatabase() - Android will manage and cache the connection so you don't need to.

In fact, refer to the official Google Using Databases documentation:

To write to and read from the database, call getWritableDatabase() and getReadableDatabase(), respectively. These both return a SQLiteDatabase