Two new pieces of news regarding MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) have been published today. SQLite provides non-RDBMS based databases for applications and Core Data provides an MVC architecture using SQLite for the storage of data. The latter is a stormingly good idea. The following is taken from a report in Apple Insider.

SQLite Support

Another feature of Tiger is SQLite support, which incorporates the SQLite library into the system to provide an embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine for applications.

Developers who link their applications to this library can access SQL databases without running a separate relational database management system (RDBMS) process. The library can also be used to create local database files and manage the tables and records in that file.

Core Data Framework

SQLite is optimized to provide fast access to database records and is designed for general-purpose use. One example is Core Data — a new Apple framework that simplifies application creation based on a Model-View-Controller architecture — that uses SQLite extensively to provide backend storage for user-defined data.

Core Data is intended for applications that have a significant amount of structured data to manage. According to sources, the library will handle developer tasks such as retrieving object data from disks, maintaining references to those objects, and writing modified objects back to disk.

The new Tiger-only Core Data framework will also provide developers with simplified management of undo and redo operations, support for validation of property values, support for propagating changes, grouping, filtering, and organizing data in memory and transferring those changes to the user interface through Cocoa bindings.