iOS Realm open source database, any good, popular?

[1458279]

I don't remember ever hearing about Realm before and just stumbled across it.

The headlines look interesting, but I'd like to hear from some in the industry.

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/07/22/realm/#gref


A startup launched a year ago by these former Nokia engineers is already powering half a billion smartphones
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-realm-database-is-going-bonkers-2015-7

This site suggest:
1. Ease of use
2. Speed
3. Realm Browser
4. Cross-platform
5. Free, Well-documented, Other Features

http://sebastiandobrincu.com/blog/5-reasons-why-you-should-choose-realm-over-coredata

However, I haven't heard much about it before. Anyone know much about it? Is it worth looking at? Is it used in the job market?

https://github.com/realm/realm-cocoa

 

[Mascots]

I've really only seen it in crossing but it isn't anything I am particularly interested in.
The BI piece is nothing more than fluff and full of useless information for those who are actually going to be using the tool.

But if there's one thing that really sticks out from skimming more developer oriented material, it's the speed benefit. However, I never have and most likely never will experience a situation in which I choose an alternative framework (i.e., not Core Data) for a speed benefit alone. Other factors that Realm isn't looking to solve would be more persuasive.
It's important to keep in mind the state of hardware as well - devices are not getting cheaper (component wise) or slower, but quite the opposite. This makes the "it's slow" or "we have to work around hardware limitations by software tricks" a lot less relevant when dealing with larger frameworks.

Don't let me **** all over it, though - you all know I am a Core Data snob (and something will need replace it). I'm curious about others perspectives.

 

[1458279]

I've really only seen it in crossing but it isn't anything I am particularly interested in.
The BI piece is nothing more than fluff and full of useless information for those who are actually going to be using the tool.

But if there's one thing that really sticks out from skimming more developer oriented material, it's the speed benefit. However, I never have and most likely never will experience a situation in which I choose an alternative framework (i.e., not Core Data) for a speed benefit alone. Other factors that Realm isn't looking to solve would be more persuasive.
It's important to keep in mind the state of hardware as well - devices are not getting cheaper (component wise) or slower, but quite the opposite. This makes the "it's slow" or "we have to work around hardware limitations by software tricks" a lot less relevant when dealing with larger frameworks.

Don't let me **** all over it, though - you all know I am a Core Data snob (and something will need replace it). I'm curious about others perspectives.

Speed is really a relative thing. If you go back in time, a 33K modem was considered fast. Now, DSL is considered slow.

This is more true with mobile devices as they can't put large heat sinks on the phones, do the CPUs will only add more cores and cache.

Users always want more and if one product doesn't give it to them, another will (or at least try). I could see speed being a huge advantage as we have communication limits. There's already problems in many area of lines of communications.

However, my main concern is how popular something is. There's been plenty of solutions to problems, but most of them never catch much ground.

Basically I'm just trying to find out which way the markets are going.

 

[Mascots]

This is more true with mobile devices as they can't put large heat sinks on the phones, do the CPUs will only add more cores and cache.

Users always want more and if one product doesn't give it to them, another will (or at least try). I could see speed being a huge advantage as we have communication limits. There's already problems in many area of lines of communications.

Oh yeah, I more-or-less agree, but at least from my perspective, we are coming to a nice crossroads of power-efficient, small, & powerful CPUs to productivity which means additional gains are becoming more of a convenience rather than a requirement (if that line of thinking makes sense). But that convenience may or may not be a requirement in the future though, as you explained by way of relative speed, which is why I don't like to stifle gains like this too much. Personally, it's just about the overall benefit which isn't quite there for me - though that is basically the fallacy of "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" so take my feelings with heaps of salt.

However, my main concern is how popular something is. There's been plenty of solutions to problems, but most of them never catch much ground.

Basically I'm just trying to find out which way the markets are going.

I think the recent turbulence with Parse is what really has me anxious about market driven "solution" to "problems". Parse was actually filling a major hole in the mobile community, but, not even Facebook could make it as sustainable in the mass market as they wanted (*speculation on my end of course). In Realms case, they want to highlight problems to which they have a solution - but to many people, many of these problems are trivial.

 

[1458279]

I'm glad you mentioned Parse. I've only used it in tutorials, but it looked like a really useful service.

As far as FB goes, I would have thought of it as a "gift" to the world and if I were FB, I would have kept it going as long as the costs didn't grow too much.

I read an article a while back about an app dev that was using AWS and the costs went up to something like 250K/month or something huge like that. They moved over to a leased server type thing and saved a HUGE amount of money.

The point I gathered from it was that you can take the easy route and pay thru the nose when it grows, or you can build your own and save. Just like programming itself, you can pay a pro $100/hour or you can hit the books and do it yourself. One is easy and expensive, they other is hard/risky and cheaper.

As far as speed goes, in the world of software, you have to compete and grow. Many things have costs and one is usually speed. The devices are very limited. Look at how Apple has pushed for battery life and data costs. Data speed might not be a big issue in all cases, but think about people that have poor data connection speeds as well as crowed, shared WiFi and we just keep adding more people to the same system.

Some apps don't use a lot of data, but some are all data, so it really depends on the app. Good to know we at least have some choices.

If it does take hold, maybe someone will write a conversion interface to it

 

[AxoNeuron]

I had never heard of realm but it looks pretty interesting, I will try it out soon. I'm getting pretty tired of Core Data to be honest.

 

[1458279]

I had never heard of realm but it looks pretty interesting, I will try it out soon. I'm getting pretty tired of Core Data to be honest.

Ok, now I'm scared. Why would you be tired of Core Data? I hope it's not a heavily flawed product because I intend on learning in more in depth.

This reminds me of when MicroSoft has about 6 methods to access databases back in the 90's. I really which they would have just picked 1 or 2 and we wouldn't have to waste time learning things that would later be dumped.

Core Data seems to be very popular.