Using SQLite to store data

SQLite is one of the most popular databases for compactly storing structured data. We will use the SQL binding for Haskell to store a list of strings.

Getting Ready

We must first install the SQLite3 database on our system. On Debian-based systems, we can issue the following installation command:

$ sudo apt-get install sqlite3

Install the SQLite package from cabal, as shown in the following command:

$ cabal install sqlite-simple

Create an initial database called test.db that sets up the schema. In this recipe, we will only be storing integers with strings as follows:

$ sqlite3 test.db "CREATE TABLE test (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, str text);"

How to do it…

1. Import the relevant libraries, as shown in the following code:

   {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
   import Control.Applicative
   import Database.SQLite.Simple
   import Database.SQLite.Simple.FromRow

2. Create a FromRow typeclass implementation for TestField, the data type we will be storing, as shown in the following...