Mac Geekery

Check out the Core Data documentation on Apple’s developer web site http://developer.apple.com to learn how you can use it from Cocoa. Another good resource is Apple’s Cocoa-Dev mailing list; you might try asking there how some of the participants would approach developing such an application.

The articles in this series are very obviously about how to use Core Data without writing any code. To do the kinds of things you describe above, you’ll have to write code – the point of Core Data is to make that code easier and more straightforward to write, and to take care of the tedious details for you while letting you concentrate on what’s unique about your application.

Just note that Core Data is not an SQL wrapper. It’s an object graph management and persistence framework. You don’t work in terms of tables, you work with graphs of interconnected objects and let Core Data handle the heavy lifting of loading, persistence, and change tracking for you. It’s a much more convenient way to develop application than by writing code to a thin wrapper around SQL statements.