Flat-File Databases
A flat-file database is simply a plain text file that stores multiple records separated by delimiters. A delimiter is a character, or group of characters, that indicates where one record (or field) ends and another begins. Flat-file databases ordinarily use one delimiter to indicate the breaks between records, and a different delimiter to indicate the breaks between the fields that make up a record. Alternatively, if you know what size each field is going to be, you can split the data up by assigning a width to each field.
If you know, for example, that the colon (:) character isn’t going to appear within the data in your file, you could use the colon to separate the fields in each record. Another popular method of delimiting ...
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