I want to connect to a remote database(MySQL or SQL Server or Oracle) via internet from my native iphone app. I can't find any API or Framework in System to add. does any one know how to connect to a remote Database? pleased help me. Thank you very much
I'm not an iPhone programmer, but I would suspect you want some abstraction going on.
Instead of trying to make a native database connection work, consider writing some service layer that talks to the database on the back-end, and speaks HTTP to your client application.
Plenty of very good reasons for this. Security concerns chief among them.
One way to do it would be to setup an HTTPS server that wraps your requests. Submit your queries via HTTPS POST. The server setup would be pretty basic and it gives you the chance to do any post-processing before sending it over the wire.
The best alternative is to use webservices to access the information stored remotely.
Bye.
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I know this has been asked a few times, but there seems to be no clear answer ... am searching on this for the past 3 days or more.
There seem to be 2 ways to connect to an Oracle database from an iOS App :
ODBC Client
I need to compile ODBC (which ODBC?) using gcj for ARM. I think this is the hard way, wrought with errors, but possible with quite an effort.
USING WEB SERVICE
Connect from App to webservice and from web service to Oracle DB.
Are these the 2 methods available or any other?
Few questions on the two methods:
a. Which is more secure?
b. Will my company's security department oppose to any of the above?
c. Which is more performant?
d. Which of the above does one normally use?
Webservices are the answer, you do not want people connecting directly to the database from a mobile device. A Webserver will add one extra layer of security as well as the ability to handle simultaneous request without stressing the database directly
a. Which is more secure?
Webservices as explained above
b. Will my company's security department oppose to any of the above?
Yes, security department will insist not to open the oracle port to connect directly, unless they have it already open.
c. Which is more performant?
Webservices, setting up the right cache policies in a webserver can save resources to the database.
d. Which of the above does one normally use?
Webservices, because they offer you great advantages in security and performance, not only that, webservices are reusable and can be accessed by many different platforms, think on the future you might want to serve your application later on Android devices and Webservices will save you a lot of development time.
Many of today's top applications in the market use webservices, think about it.
Google Maps is a great example of how powerful webservices are!
It's not a good idea to connect to your database directly from your app. It can be secure if you create an account that can do nothing but SELECT, but there are some other things to consider.
Why burden the app with the Oracle client?
If you have many users you have to worry about Oracle handling a huge number of simultaneous connections. With a Restful API requests are stateless.
If you decide to change your schema. You'll also have to change your app. When you place a service in between, the app is no longer dependent on the schema.
ODBC connection will require that the Oracle port is open to the Internet, which in vast majority of cases will not be allowed for security and performance reasons. Even if it were, or even if you establish a secure VPN, a direct database access requires that the connection is kept open, which can be problematic when a mobile device can go in and out of the network coverage.
HTTP is far more tolerant to unreliable networks and can be encrypted using SSL (HTTPS). The problem with HTTP is that database do not have direct support for this transport so most people develop dedicated web services.
I work on a project called SlashDB, which automatically constructs RESTful APIs out of databases. For public APIs you would install /db in so called DMZ (a network segment between two firewalls) as described in this blog post.
SlashDB can be configured to allow restricted data access to public users or you can define specific users with varying privileges to data. It is designed as stateless service, which means that you can easily set up multiple nodes behind a load balancer and reverse HTTP proxy for high availability web scale deployments.
Regardless whether you develop the web service by hand or use our product you will achieve better scalablity, performance and security for your solution than by using direct client/server approach. I would even argue that REST APIs should be used internal enterprise data integration solutions but that's a whole new topic.
I am going to repeat what everyone else said, Rest API is the way to go. Do not connect to the database directly. However, there might be a way to connect to your database which I never tried my self.
http://odbcrouter.com/iosvsweb#hn_iOS_Open_Database_Connectivity_SDK
now I have an iPhone App and basically I want to exchange data from my database (MongoDB) on a server.
Could you please tell me exactly what I should do?
Forgive my innocence, I am a beginner in this area...Thank you very much ahead of time!!
I think you have two options to talk to mongo :
1) Use the rest interface http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Http+Interface
2) Use Objective-C driver: https://github.com/timburks/NuMongoDB
If you're not completely tied to MongoDB, have a look at CouchDB. It's essentially the same thing as MongoDB (JSON document store) but for the web. They have a nice built-in REST interface which makes database interaction in mobile/server environments very nice.
http://couchdb.apache.org/
In addition to Sid's options, you can also build your own backend that talks to mongodb, that communicates via REST (in your language of choice). This way you can pool your connections on the backend and avoid connectivity issues from the devices.
I am looking for a tutorial on how to make an iPhone app that fetches data from and writes data to a MySQL database. I've seen some other threads saying that I should make an abstraction layer so as not to connect directly to the database from my app, but I'm not sure of how to actually go about doing this. Does anyone know of any tutorials that involve creating an abstraction layer for a MySQL database or connecting a MySQL database to an iPhone app?
To clarify, I am looking for a secure method that wouldn't allow people to sniff out my MySQL host, username and password. It seems like the libraries that connect directly to MySQL from the iPhone all have this problem, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
This is a really good tutorial that covers how to communicate with MySQL from an iPhone app using PHP:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/2941/how-to-write-a-simple-phpmysql-web-service-for-an-ios-app
I know only one library, which makes possible connection from iPhone to MySQL. This is port of official MySQL C libraries created by Karl Kraft.
Author published also small portion of samples, which describes how to use this library.
UPDATE (Karl Kraft's broken link)
Instead of link above, I used an archived copy.
not up to date, but this tutorial helped me a lot:
http://codewithchris.com/iphone-app-connect-to-mysql-database/#connectiphonetomysql
Here http://blog.iosplace.com/?p=30 is a snippet that uses the original mysql client lib, and here http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2012/01/ is a link to a 3rd-party connector.
Here is a nice tutorial on how to connect to a database using web service layer.
From a practical perspective you could connect directly to a database from an iphone because that is a client server transaction. The problem is that you would need to expose your database server an issue that many would find very disturbing, because you would expose your server which hold your most valuable resource "your data". Of course you can implement and could be a good solution for rather small projects. But you would need to implement the layer which it would be used to connect on the iOS app, adding more complex to the matter.
Using a web service is more reliable even from the iOS developer, because there is a very extensive api for using web service, which offer great functionality (asynchronous transactions, threads management,JSON Mapping, XML Mapping) to name a few.
Use the library OHMySQL. It copes with MySQL through MySQL C API.
I want the way with the fastest execution time. I'm not feeling comfortable of using web service because i need to create separate php pages and retrieve data as xml. If you think its good to use web service please tell me why. I want to code my database queries right on my c/objective c pages.
I've been searching for libraries. I saw this sequel pro - won't i have any problems on using this - like licensing issues? I also saw this libmysqlclient of cocoa but some say its not working well. I've also read about a library developed by Karl Kraft found here http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2010/06/02/mysql-and-objective-c/ but don't know if i could trust this.
I would really appreciate you help.
Definitely build a web service to act as an abstraction layer to your database. Here are some significant reasons in my opinion:
Since you want speed, you will be able to add caching when using the webservice, so you will essentially eliminate the need for identical queries to run (sometimes).
If you need to change your data model later, you just have to modify the webservice backend and don't have to update your app.
You can better control security by not exposing the database to the world, and keep it safe behind the web service.
Your database credentials should not be stored in an app. What if you needed to change those?
I strongly suggest a web service. Hope this helps.
Connect to your DB by PHP and output the result as JSON
is much better and faster then xml and less coding if use JSON Framework.
and never never try to connect to your DB from your iphone because it easy to sniff out the request from iphone.
Being safe then Sorry, keep that in mind
I'm in the middle of working on my first native application with networking and I have a question regarding the best way for interacting with remote storage. In a perfect world I'd like to do the following.
Prompt the user for login information from the iPhone.
Verify the users credentials and connect to a MYSQL database hosted by myself.
Parse MYSQL data into a table view.
Allow the user to add or update information in the database.
I've read some similar questions posted, maybe something's lost in translation, but the two most common means I've come across are.
Create a web service for handling these requests using SOAP/REST/JSON (no experience doing this, but would like to learn if it's a better implementation)
Write PHP scripts (enough experience to get by) that will grab data username/password/requests securely from my NSURLRequest and echo the NSData as XML and parse it with an NSXMLParser.
Are there other options? Is one a better implementation over the other? (web services come up more in searches)
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read my question and possibly clearing up any confusion.
Whoa! Web Services! Oh wait, calling a PHP script that returns JSON is actually also a web service. Well, that makes things simpler :-)
Yeah, so I would go for this:
Write a PHP script that returns JSON data (many tutorials available)
Protect the PHP script by setting up 'Basic access authentication' (Apache documentation)
Tell Apache to take the user database from your mysql database
Run your service on secure (HTTPS) web server (important because basic auth is not secure)
This way you can use almost all standard components on the iPhone side. NSURLConnection will talk HTTP(S) and there are excellent open source JSON parsers for Objective-C.