Talk:Flat file database

References

The things I wrote about here are old textbook stuff and work experience for me, so I hope further sources will not be needed. But if people think it is needed, and are able to provide such references - fine! Olav Næss 02:51, 8 April 2007 (CDT)

I would think we'd need to find at least several valid sources, to at least help someone e.g writing a paper on databases. Or possibly a "See Also" or "External Links" section --Eric M Gearhart 04:30, 8 April 2007 (CDT)

flat file or text file

the earliest flat files that were used as files to store information, used and created for instance by cobol where just plain text strings. The original name reflected that difference as these were NO database. I wonder what made someone think the earlier mentioned flat file (text) databases has got anything to do with relations as they stem from the 50's and early 60's. These files were indicated, not two dimensional arrays of information with their own local formatting. Flat file text database files got their meaning by the program that created and used them. Something totally different from the files here. Robert Tito |  Talk  18:36, 20 June 2007 (CDT)

I'm a little confused as to the point of this article. What's wrong with having a flat file be a flat file, without any DBMS terminology? When I first touched a computer, there were some complex structures in main memory, but on a mass storage device, there was nothing except flat files. Yes, it was possible to go to an individual record, if you had some sort of index.

There were quite complex report generators (e.g., MARK IV) that ran against flat files, but it was a new kind of thinking when I started working in MUMPS, which actually let tree-structured data be written to disk while preserving the structure. Indexed sequential was common enough in the early seventies, as well as direct access with the index stored as a flat file that got slurped into memory and constructed as linked lists, trees, etc.

When I first started using things that were called "databases", they were application-specific, such as MEDLINE, MARC, RECON, and other bibliographic systems. I'm actually hard-pressed to remember when commercial RDBMS started showing up as routine tools...early 80's? Howard C. Berkowitz 19:47, 6 August 2008 (CDT)