3.1. Sequential Access
Many of my readers have not ever worked with or perhaps even seen a tape file system. I hope that looking at tape drives in old science fiction movies will convince you that doing random access on magnetic tape is not practical. Tapes are dying out even for archival storage today. The last major advance in the technology was a drive from IBM that archived and encrypted the data in the hardware.
So, why do I bother to mention it? Because the spirit of the magnetic tape files lives on, long after the body is gone. If you scan any SQL newsgroup, you will find newbie programmers using temporary tables and cursors to mimic tapes. This approach to data is very natural to programmers who learned to program on file systems.
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