Specify column names in a SELECT or INSERT statement.

Well this is not specific to AIR, but it is still really easy to implement so I thought it was worth mentioning. So in a SELECT Statement list the column name you want instead of using the *. Even if you need all the columns, list them all, it’s going to execute faster.

var selectStmt:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();
 
//so instead of doing this:
selectStmt.text =  "SELECT * FROM myTable";
 
//do this:
selectStmt.text =  "SELECT columnName1, columnName2 FROM myTable";

Always write the name of the database when you write the name of a table

I don’t know just how much speed gain this is suppoed to give but it is pretty easy to do so I suggest doing this all the time. Now, at first I was confused by  how I could find the name of the database I wanted to do a query on. It happens that most of the time, the name of your database is just going to be “main”. This can change when you use the attach method of a SQLConnection to add multiple database to a connection to do a query on tables from different database. When you attach a new database you will have to provide a name (you can choose what you want) and the first database will still be called “main”

So from my previous example, if we follow this advise, it will look like this:

var selectStmt:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();
selectStmt.text =  "SELECT columnName1, columnName2 FROM main.myTable";
//main.myTable instead of just myTable

Parametrize your statements

This is something I was completely new to. From my PHP/MySQL experience here is what I would have written for an UPDATE statement with a WHERE clause:

_updateStmt = new SQLStatement();
_updateStmt.sqlConnection = _conn;
_updateStmt.text = "UPDATE main.myTable SET statusF=" + currentStatus + "  WHERE keyId=" + currentId;
_updateStmt.execute();

This is ok if you will use that statement only once in your application, but if you are going to use it multiple times like in a for loop, you’d better use a parametrized statement. It seems like a costly operation is preparing the SQLStatement and a statement is prepared everytime you change its text property. Now here is how you would parametrize the previous example:

_updateStmt = new SQLStatement();
_updateStmt.sqlConnection = _conn;
_updateStmt.text = "UPDATE main.myTable SET statusF=@STATUS  WHERE keyId=@ID";
_updateStmt.parameters["@STATUS"] = currentStatus;
_updateStmt.parameters["@ID"] = currentId;
_updateStmt.execute();

Again, just like this it doesn’t save much, it starts to make sense in a for loop_updateStmt = new SQLStatement();

_updateStmt.sqlConnection = _conn;
_updateStmt.text = "UPDATE main.myTable SET statusF=@STATUS  WHERE keyId=@ID";
 
for (var i:uint = 0; i < currentArray.length; i++){
  _updateStmt.parameters["@STATUS"] = currentArray[i].status;
  _updateStmt.parameters["@ID"] = currentArray[i].id;
  _updateStmt.execute();
}

Use Transactions

This is probably the biggest optimisation you can do. The principle of a transaction is that instead of executing all your statement separately, it will execute them all at the same time. Refer to the previously linked help file from Adobe for more information on this. Transactions are best suited for query that don’t need results like INSERT and UPDATE statements. Transactions are easy to implement:_updateStmt = new SQLStatement();

_updateStmt.sqlConnection = _conn;
_updateStmt.text = "UPDATE main.myTable SET statusF=@STATUS  WHERE keyId=@ID";
 
_conn.begin();//_conn is a SQLConnection, I didn't take the time to write the code for it, but this is where the magic happens
 
for (var i:uint = 0; i < currentArray.length; i++){
  _updateStmt.parameters["@STATUS"] = currentArray[i].status;
  _updateStmt.parameters["@ID"] = currentArray[i].id;
  _updateStmt.execute();
}
 
_conn.commit();

Only when the application will run the commit method will all the SQLStatement will be executed.

This is all the SQLite optimization tricks I have for now, but I still have to investigate indexes which might also help speed up queries.