This can also be done with any typewriter or word processor. Another example of a flat file is a name-and-address list with the fields Name, Address, and Phone Number.Ī list of names, addresses, and phone numbers written by hand on a sheet of paper is a flat-file database. Use of character delimiters which include a length component ( Declarative notation) is comparatively rare but vastly reduces the overhead associated with locating the extent of each field.Įxamples of flat files include /etc/passwd and /etc/group on Unix-like operating systems. However, use of character delimiters (especially commas) is also a crude form of data compression which may assist overall performance by reducing data volumes - especially for data transmission purposes. Using delimiters incurs some overhead in locating them every time they are processed (unlike fixed-width formatting), which may have performance implications. Extra formatting may be needed to avoid delimiter collision. In other cases, each field may have a fixed length short values may be padded with space characters. In comma-separated values and delimiter-separated values files, fields can be separated by delimiters such as comma or tab characters. There are different conventions for depicting data. Plain text files usually contain one record per line. The term has generally implied a small database, but very large databases can also be flat. Relationships can be inferred from the data in the database, but the database format itself does not make those relationships explicit. A flat file can be a plain text file (e.g. Records follow a uniform format, and there are no structures for indexing or recognizing relationships between records. ( March 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī flat-file database is a database stored in a file called a flat file. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. This article possibly contains original research.
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