File Design
Introduction.
- Most fundamental entities from the data model would be designed as master or transaction records.
- The master files a typically fixed length records.
- Associative entities from the data model are typically joined into the transaction records to form variable length records (based on the one-to-many relationships).
- Other types of files (not represented in the data model) are added as necessary.
- Two important considerations of file design are file access and organization.
- The systems analyst usually studies how each program will access the records in the file (‘sequentially’ or ‘randomly’), and then select an appropriate file organization.