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L1 - CD 303 Concept of Data Structure

The document discusses the concept of data structures. It defines data as values or sets of values that can be organized into a hierarchy of fields, records, and files. An entity has attributes that can be assigned values. Data structures provide a logical and mathematical model for organizing data in a way that reflects relationships and allows for efficient processing and common operations like traversing, searching, inserting, deleting, sorting, and merging. The choice of a data structure depends on accurately modeling real-world relationships while allowing simple and effective processing of the data.

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Aryaman Bhatnagar
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20 views

L1 - CD 303 Concept of Data Structure

The document discusses the concept of data structures. It defines data as values or sets of values that can be organized into a hierarchy of fields, records, and files. An entity has attributes that can be assigned values. Data structures provide a logical and mathematical model for organizing data in a way that reflects relationships and allows for efficient processing and common operations like traversing, searching, inserting, deleting, sorting, and merging. The choice of a data structure depends on accurately modeling real-world relationships while allowing simple and effective processing of the data.

Uploaded by

Aryaman Bhatnagar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Topic- Concept of Data Structure

Subject Name/Code- Data Structure/CD 303


CSE- Data Science

Concept of Data Structure:


Data are simply values or sets of values. A data item refers to a single unit of
values. Data items that are divided into sub items are called group items; those
that are not are called elementary items. For example, an employee's name
may be divided into three sub items-first name, middle initial and last name-
but the social secur.ity number would normally be treated as a single item.
Collections of data are frequently organized into a hierarchy of fields, records
and files.

An entity is something that has certain attributes or properties which may be


assigned values. The values themselves may be either numeric or nonnumeric.

The term "information" is sometimes used for data with given attributes, or,
in other words, meaningful or processed data. The way that data are organized
into the hierarchy of fields, records and files reflects the relationship between
attributes, entities and entity sets. That is, a field is a single elementary of
information representing an attribute of an entity, a record is the collection of
field values of a given entity and a file is the collection of records of the
entities in a given entity set.

Each record in a file may contain many field items, but the value in a certain
field may uniquely determine the record in the file. Such a field K is called a
primary key, and the values k1 k2, . . . in such a field are called keys or key
values.

The above organization of data into fields, records and files may not be
complex enough to maintain and efficiently process certain collections of
data. For this reason, data are also organized into more complex types of
structures. The study of such data structures, which forms the subject matter
of this text, includes the following three steps:

(1) Logical or mathematical description of the structure

(2) Implementation of the structure on a computer

(3) Quantitative analysis of the structure, which includes determining the


amount of memory needed to store the structure and the time required to
process the structure
Data may be organized in many different ways; the logical or mathematical
model of a particular organization of data is called a data structure. The choice
of a particular data model depends on two considerations.

(1) it must be rich enough in structure to mirror the actual relationships of the
data it" the real world.

(2) On the other hand, the structure should be simple enough that one can
effectively process the data when necessary.

A data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a


computer so that it can be used efficiently. Different kinds of data structures
are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to
specific tasks.

The data appearing in our data structures are processed by means of certain
operations. In fact, the particular data structure that one chooses for a given
situation depends largely on the frequency with which specific operations are
performed.

The following four operations play a major role :

(1) Traversing: Accessing each record exactly once so that certain items in the
record may be processed. (This accessing and processing is sometimes called
"visiting" the record.)

(2) Searching: Finding the location of the record with a given key value, or
finding the locations of all records which satisfy one or more conditions.

(3) Inserting: Adding a new record to the structure.

(4) Deleting: Removing a record from the structure.

(5) Sorting: Arranging the records in some logical order (e.g., alphabetically
according to some NAME key, or in numerical order according to some
NUMBER key, such as social security number or account number)

(6) Merging: Combining the records in two different sorted files into a single
sorted file.

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