Chapter Four Record Storage and Primary File Organization

Chapter Four

Record Storage and Primary File Organization

Databases are stored in file formats, which contain records. At physical level, actual data is
stored in electromagnetic format on some device capable of storing it for a longer amount of
time. These storage devices can be broadly categorized in three types:

 Primary Storage: The memory storage, which is directly accessible by the CPU, comes
under this category. CPU's internal memory (registers), fast memory (cache) and main
memory (RAM) are directly accessible to CPU as they all are placed on the motherboard
or CPU chipset. This storage is typically very small, ultra fast and volatile. This storage
needs continuous power supply in order to maintain its state, i.e. in case of power failure
all data are lost.
 Secondary Storage: The need to store data for longer amount of time and to retain it
even after the power supply is interrupted gave birth to secondary data storage. All
memory devices, which are not part of CPU chipset or motherboard comes under this
category. Broadly, magnetic disks, all optical disks (DVD, CD etc.), flash drives and
magnetic tapes are not directly accessible by the CPU. Hard disk drives, which contain
the operating system and generally not removed from the computers are, considered
secondary storage and all other are called tertiary storage.
 Tertiary Storage: Third level in memory hierarchy is called tertiary storage. This is used
to store huge amount of data. Because this storage is external to the computer system, it is
the slowest in speed. These storage devices are mostly used to backup the entire system.
Optical disk and magnetic tapes are widely used storage devices as tertiary storage.

Memory Hierarchy

A computer system has well-defined hierarchy of memory. CPU has inbuilt registers, which saves
data being operated on. Computer system has main memory, which is also directly accessible by

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CPU. Because the access time of main memory and CPU speed varies a lot, to minimize the loss
cache memory is introduced. Cache memory contains most recently used data and data which may be
referred by CPU in near future.

The memory with fastest access is the costliest one and is the very reason of hierarchy of memory
system. Larger storage offers slow speed but can store huge amount of data compared to CPU
registers or Cache memory and these are less expensive.

Relative data and information is stored collectively in file formats. A file is sequence of records
stored in binary format. A disk drive is formatted into several blocks, which are capable for storing
records. File records are mapped onto those disk blocks.

File Organization

The method of mapping file records to disk blocks defines file organization, i.e. how the file
records are organized. The following are the types of file organization

 Heap File Organization: When a file is created using Heap File Organization
mechanism, the Operating Systems allocates memory area to that file without any further
accounting details. File records can be placed anywhere in that memory area. It is the
responsibility of software to manage the records. Heap File does not support any
ordering, sequencing or indexing on its own.
 Sequential File Organization: Every file record contains a data field (attribute) to
uniquely identify that record. In sequential file organization mechanism, records are
placed in the file in the some sequential order based on the unique key field or search
key. Practically, it is not possible to store all the records sequentially in physical form.
 Hash File Organization: This mechanism uses a Hash function computation on some
field of the records. As we know, that file is a collection of records, which has to be
mapped on some block of the disk space allocated to it. This mapping is defined that the

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hash computation. The output of hash determines the location of disk block where the
records may exist.
 Clustered File Organization: Clustered file organization is not considered good for
large databases. In this mechanism, related records from one or more relations are kept in
a same disk block, that is, the ordering of records is not based on primary key or search
key. This organization helps to retrieve data easily based on particular join condition.
Other than particular join condition, on which data is stored, all queries become more
expensive.

File Operations

Operations on database files can be classified into two categories broadly.

 Update Operations
 Retrieval Operations

Update operations change the data values by insertion, deletion or update. Retrieval operations
on the other hand do not alter the data but retrieve them after optional conditional filtering. In
both types of operations, selection plays significant role. Other than creation and deletion of a
file, there could be several operations, which can be done on files.

 Open: A file can be opened in one of two modes, read mode or write mode. In read
mode, operating system does not allow anyone to alter data it is solely for reading
purpose. Files opened in read mode can be shared among several entities. The other mode
is write mode, in which, data modification is allowed. Files opened in write mode can be
read also but cannot be shared.
 Locate: Every file has a file pointer, which tells the current position where the data is to
be read or written. This pointer can be adjusted accordingly. Using find (seek) operation
it can be moved forward or backward.
 Read: By default, when files are opened in read mode the file pointer points to the
beginning of file. There are options where the user can tell the operating system to where
the file pointer to be located at the time of file opening. The very next data to the file
pointer is read.
 Write: User can select to open files in write mode, which enables them to edit the content
of file. It can be deletion, insertion or modification. The file pointer can be located at the
time of opening or can be dynamically changed if the operating system allowed doing so.
 Close: This also is most important operation from operating system point of view. When
a request to close a file is generated, the operating system removes all the locks (if in
shared mode) and saves the content of data (if altered) to the secondary storage media
and release all the buffers and file handlers associated with the file.

The organization of data content inside the file plays a major role here. Seeking or locating the
file pointer to the desired record inside file behaves differently if the file has records arranged
sequentially or clustered, and so on.

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