File organization refers to the manner in which the records of a file are arranged on secondary storage. The most popular file organization...
File organization refers to the manner in which the records of a file are arranged on secondary storage. The most popular file organization schemes in use today follows.
- sequential – Records are placed in physical order. The “next” record is the one that physically follows the previous record. This organization is natural for files stored on magnetic tape, an inherently sequential medium.
- direct – records are directly (randomly) accessed by their physical addresses on a direct access storage device (DASD).
- indexed sequential – records are arranged in logical sequence according to a key contained in each record. Indexed sequential records may be accessed sequentially in key order or they may be accessed directly.
- Partitioned – This is essentially a file of sequential subfiles. Each sequential subfile is called a member. The starting address of each member is stored in the file’s directory.
