Thanks for the quick reply. CoreData is not a database. Under the hood it uses either XML, Binary, SQLite or In-Memory. SQLite is the most common. So. I'm only dealing with CoreData here and want to know how I can easily populate my App with my data (think of 100+ animals with all sorts of attributes like male/female, color, name. living area, etc.). Hope this clarifies it a bit. I appreciate the link but it talks about really using SQLite... :-)