Creating and Using Flat File Databases

Flat file databases are about the easiest databases you can create. To create a small ASCII text database, you need nothing more than a language with which to program and a text editor.

A flat file database consists mainly of lines of text, in which each line is its own entry. If you have more than one field for each record, the records are usually separated by a delimiter. No special technique is used to index the database. Therefore, flat file databases usually are relatively small (about 1,000–2,000 records). The larger the database, the longer it takes to perform queries to it.

In a flat file database, each record is contained on its own line. The number of fields in each record is completely up to you, ...

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