Other Primary File Organizations

Other Primary File Organizations

1. Files of Mixed Records

The file organizations we have studied so far assume that all records of a particular file are of the same record type. The records could be of EMPLOYEEs, PROJECTs, STUDENTs, or DEPARTMENTs, but each file contains records of only one type. In most database applications, we encounter situations in which numerous types of entities are interrelated in various ways, as we saw in Chapter 7. Relationships among records in various files can be represented by connecting fields. For exam-ple, a STUDENT record can have a connecting field Major_dept whose value gives the name of the DEPARTMENT in which the student is majoring. This Major_dept field refers to a DEPARTMENT entity, which should be represented by a record of its own in the DEPARTMENT file. If we want to retrieve field values from two related records, we must retrieve one of the records first. Then we can use its connecting field value to retrieve the related record in the other file. Hence, relationships are implemented by logical field references among the records in distinct files.

File organizations in object DBMSs, as well as legacy systems such as hierarchical and network DBMSs, often implement relationships among records as physical relationships realized by physical contiguity (or clustering) of related records or by physical pointers. These file organizations typically assign an area of the disk to hold records of more than one type so that records of different types can be physically clustered on disk. If a particular relationship is expected to be used frequently, implementing the relationship physically can increase the system’s efficiency at retrieving related records. For example, if the query to retrieve a DEPARTMENT record and all records for STUDENTs majoring in that department is frequent, it would be desirable to place each DEPARTMENT record and its cluster of STUDENT records contiguously on disk in a mixed file. The concept of physical clustering of object types is used in object DBMSs to store related objects together in a mixed file.

To distinguish the records in a mixed file, each record has—in addition to its field values—a record type field, which specifies the type of record. This is typically the first field in each record and is used by the system software to determine the type of record it is about to process. Using the catalog information, the DBMS can deter-mine the fields of that record type and their sizes, in order to interpret the data val-ues in the record.

2. B-Trees and Other Data Structures as Primary Organization

Other data structures can be used for primary file organizations. For example, if both the record size and the number of records in a file are small, some DBMSs offer the option of a B-tree data structure as the primary file organization. We will describe B-trees in Section 18.3.1, when we discuss the use of the B-tree data structure for indexing. In general, any data structure that can be adapted to the characteristics of disk devices can be used as a primary file organization for record placement on disk. Recently, column-based storage of data has been proposed as a primary method for storage of relations in relational databases. We will briefly introduce it in Chapter 18 as a possible alternative storage scheme for relational databases.