Re: Flat Query

"David Cressey" <david.cressey_at_earthlink.net> writes:
> Only if the record's addresses could be computed (or pointed to).
> In general, the only kinds of unindexed files whose record address
> was computable were fixed length records. And in general, fixed
> lentgth records corresponded to flat files.
>
> Sure you can come up with exceptions. But i'm describing the
> general scenario in which that language gained usage.

lots of files were structured as fixed length records specifically for that reason ... however there were also tricks with variable blocked file type ... where there was some filesystem out-of-band infrastructure support that minimized having to perform sequential reads to do random query against a variable length record file.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/