RealmIncrementalStore

Realm-powered Core Data persistent store

Wait, what?

I like Realm. Realm’s memory-mapped DB blows other databases out of the water.
It’s fast and memory efficient.

I also like Core Data. (disclaimer: I’m the author of CoreStore.)
It’s a very stable ORM framework and it works on top of any persistent store.

Here’s the kicker: Core Data is stuck with SQLite until a better lightweight DB comes along, and Realm’s database engine is phenomenal but its Cocoa framework is still lacking some features.

Fortunately, Core Data’s NSIncrementalStore interface lets us use the best of both worlds. RealmIncrementalStore is an NSIncrementalStore subclass that dynamically creates Realm schema using your Core Data models.

Here’s an NSFetchedResultsController running on Realm back-end (right: Realm Browser):

(Check the RealmIncrementalStoreDemo to see how it works)

That said, this project is still in its prototype stages and is more of a proof-of-concept than a working product. Use at your own risk!

How to setup

Just include RealmIncrementalStore in your project and everything else is good old Core Data code. You just have to specify RealmIncrementalStore.storeType when calling addPersistentStoreWithType() on the NSPersistentStoreCoordinator:

let coordinator = NSPersistentStoreCoordinator(...)
do {
    
    try coordinator.addPersistentStoreWithType(
        RealmIncrementalStore.storeType, // here
        configuration: nil,
        URL: url,
        options: nil
    )
}
catch {
    
    // ...
}

Features

Right now, most of Core Data’s functionality works:

• Inserting / Updating / Deleting
• Fetching
• NSFetchedResultsControllers
• Relationships
• Basically most of what NSIncrementalStores were designed to work in

Missing bits / To Do

(Pull Requests are welcome!)

• Relationships (in progress, halfway there) Done
• Migrations
• Fine-grained handling of NSFetchRequests
• Optimizations (still waiting for the Realm folks to open-source the realm-core)
• Try to implement NSPredicates that are not yet supported in Realm (?)
• Benchmark!

Author

https://github.com/JohnEstropia

License

RealmIncrementalStore is released under an MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information