STUDY SESSION 2:

Access and Organization of Records, And Data Dictionary

Content

Section and Subsection Headings

Introduction

1.0 Learning Outcome

2. 0 Main Content
2. 1 Access and Organization of Records, and Data Dictionary

3.0 Conclusion/Summary
4.0 Self-Assessment Questions
5.0 Additional Activities (Videos, Animations & out of Class Activities)
6.0 Reference/Further Reading

Introduction

This study session deal with the access and organization of records in the storage of databases and the

techniques for accessing them efficiently. some of which require auxiliary data structures called indexes.

These structures are often referred to as physical database file structures

1.0 Learning Outcome

At the end of this study session, the students should be able to :

a) explain Access and Organization of Records, And Data Dictionary

b) describe the techniques for placing files records on disks
c) Identify Records and Record Types
d) Describe Files, Fixed-Length Records, and Variable-Length Records
e) Identify file headers
2.0 Main Content
2.1 Access and Organization of Records, And Data Dictionary

3.0 Conclusion/Summary
4.0 Self-Assessment Questions
5.0 Additional Activities (Videos, Animations & out of Class Activities)
6.0 Reference/Further Reading

2.1 Access and Organization of Records, And Data Dictionary.

There are several primary file organizations, which determine how the file records are physically placed

on the disk, and hence how the records can be accessed. A heap file (or unordered file) places the records

on disk in no particular order by appending new records at the end of the file, whereas a sorted file (or

sequential file) keeps the records ordered by the value of a particular field (called the sort key). A hashed

file uses a hash function applied to a particular field (called the hash key) to determine a record’s placement

on disk. Other primary file organizations, such as B-trees, use tree structures. A secondary organization

or auxiliary access structure allows efficient access to file records based on alternate fields than those that

have been used for the primary file organization.

2.1.1 Placing File Records on Disk

In this section, we define the concepts of records, record types, and files. Then we discuss
techniques for placing file records on disk.

2.1.1.1 Records and Record Types

Data is usually stored in the form of records. Each record consists of a collection of related data

values or items, where each value is formed of one or more bytes and corresponds to a particular

field of the record. Records usually describe entities and their attributes. For example, an

EMPLOYEE record represents an employee entity, and each field value in the record specifies

some attribute of that employee, such as Name, Birth_ date, Salary, or Supervisor. A collection of
field names and their corresponding data types constitutes a record type or record format definition.

A data type, associated with each field, specifies the types of values a field can take.

The data type of a field is usually one of the standard data types used in programming. These

include numeric (integer, long integer, or floating point), string of characters (fixed-length or

varying), Boolean (having 0 and 1 or TRUE and FALSE values only), and sometimes specially

coded date and time data types. The number of bytes required for each data type is fixed for a

given computer system. An integer may require 4 bytes, a long integer 8 bytes, a real number 4

bytes, a Boolean 1 byte, a date 10 bytes (assuming a format of YYYY-MM-DD), and a fixed-

length string of k characters k bytes. Variable-length strings may require as many bytes as there

are characters in each field value.

For example, an EMPLOYEE record type may be defined—using the C programming language

notation—as the following structure:

struct employee {

char name [30];

char ssn[9];

int salary;

int job_ code;

char department [20];

};
2.1.1.2 Files, Fixed-Length Records, and Variable-Length Records

file is a sequence of records. In many cases, all records in a file are of the same record type. If

every record in the file has exactly the same size (in bytes), the file is said to be made up of fixed-

length records. If different records in the file have different sizes, the file is said to be made up of

variable-length records. A file may have variable-length records for several reasons:

■ The file records are of the same record type, but one or more of the fields are of varying size

(variable-length fields). For example, the Name field of EMPLOYEE can be a variable-length

field.

■ The file records are of the same record type, but one or more of the fields may have multiple

values for individual records; such a field is called a repeating field and a group of values for the

field is often called a repeating group.

■ The file records are of the same record type, but one or more of the fields are optional; that is,

they may have values for some but not all of the file records (optional fields).

■ The file contains records of different record types and hence of varying size (mixed file). This

would occur if related records of different types were clustered (placed together) on disk blocks;

for example, the GRADE_REPORT records of a particular student may be placed following that

STUDENT’s record.
The fixed-length EMPLOYEE records in Figure below have a record size of 71 bytes. Every record

has the same fields, and field lengths are fixed, so the system can identify the starting byte position

of each field relative to the starting position of the record. This facilitates locating field values by

programs that access such files. Notice that it is possible to represent a file that logically should

have variable-length records as a fixed-length records file. For example, in the case of optional

fields, we could have every field included in every file record but store a special NULL value if

no value exists for that field. For a repeating field, we could allocate as many spaces in each record

as the maximum possible number of occurrences of the field. In either case, space is wasted when

certain records do not have values for all the physical spaces provided in each record.Now we

consider other options for formatting records of a file of variable-length records.

For variable-length fields, each record has a value for each field,but we do not know the exact

length of some field values. To determine the bytes within a particular record that represent each

field,we can use special separator characters (such as ? or % or $)—which do not appear in any

field value—to terminate variable-length fields, as shown in Figure 17.5(b), or we can store the

length in bytes of the field in the record, preceding the field value. A file of records with optional

fields can be formatted in different ways. If the total number of fields for the record type is large,

but the number of fields that actually appear in a typical record is small, we can include in each
record a sequence of <field-name, field-value> pairs rather than just the field values. Three types

of separator characters are used in Figure above, although we could use the same separator

character for the first two purposes—separating the field name from the field value and separating

one field from the next field. A more practical option is to assign a short field typecode—say,an

integer number—to each field and include in each record a sequence of <field-type, field-value>

pairs rather than <field-name, field-value> pairs. A repeating field needs one separator character

to separate the repeating values of the field and another separator character to indicate termination

of the field. Finally, for a file that includes records of different types, each record is preceded by a

record type indicator. Understandably, programs that process files of variable length records—

which are usually part of the file system and hence hidden from the typical programmers—need

to be more complex than those for fixed-length records, where the starting position and size of

each field are known and fixed.5

2.1.1.3 Record Blocking and Spanned versus Unspanned Records

The records of a file must be allocated to disk blocks because a block is the unit of data transfer

between disk and memory. When the block size is larger than the record size,each block will

contain numerous records,although some files may have unusually large records that cannot fit in

one block.Suppose that the block size is B bytes. For a file of fixed-length records of size R bytes,

with B ≥ R, we can fit bfr = ⎣B/R⎦ records per block,where the ⎣(x)⎦ (floor function) rounds down

the number x to an integer. The value bfr is called the blocking factor for the file. In general, R
may not divide B exactly,so we have some unused space in each block equal to B−(bfr * R) bytes

To utilize this unused space, we can store part of a record on one block and the rest on another.A

pointer at the end of the first block points to the block containing the remainder of the record in

case it is not the next consecutive block on disk. This organization is called spanned because

records can span more than one block. Whenever a record is larger than a block, we must use a

spanned organization. If records are not allowed to cross block boundaries, the organization is

called unspanned. This is used with fixed-length records having B > R because it makes each

record start at a known location in the block, simplifying record processing. For variable-length

records, either a spanned or an unspanned organization can be used. If the average record is large,

it is advantageous to use spanning to reduce the lost space in each block. Figure 17.6 illustrates

spanned versus unspanned organization. For variable-length records using spanned organization,

each block may store a different number of records. In this case, the blocking factor bfr represents

the average number of records per block for the file. We can use bfr to calculate the number of

blocks b needed for a file of r records: b = ⎡(r/bfr)⎤ blocks where the ⎡(x)⎤(ceiling function) rounds

the value x up to the next integer

2.1.1.4 Allocating File Blocks on Disk

There are several standard techniques for allocating the blocks of a file on disk. In contiguous

allocation, the file blocks are allocated to consecutive disk blocks. This makes reading the whole

file very fast using double buffering, but it makes expanding the file difficult. In linked allocation,

each file block contains a pointer to the next file block. This makes it easy to expand the file but

makes it slow to read the whole file. A combination of the two allocates clusters of consecutive

disk blocks, and the clusters are linked. Clusters are sometimes called file segments or extents.
Another possibility is to use indexed allocation, where one or more index blocks contain pointers

to the actual file blocks. It is also common to use combinations of these techniques.

2.1.1.5 File Headers

A file header or file descriptor contains information about a file that is needed by the system

programs that access the file records.The header includes information to determine the disk

addresses of the file blocks as well as to record format descriptions, which may include field

lengths and the order of fields within a record for fixed-length unspanned records and field type

codes, separator characters, and record type codes for variable-length records. To search for a

record on disk, one or more blocks are copied into main memory buffers. Programs then search

for the desired record or records within the buffers, using the information in the file header. If the

address of the block that contains the desired record is not known, the search programs must do a

linear search through the file blocks. Each file block is copied into a buffer and searched until the

record is located or all the file blocks have been searched unsuccessfully. This can be very time-

consuming for a large file. The goal of a good file organization is to locate the block that contains

a desired record with a minimal number of block transfers

3.0 Conclusion/Summary
We presented different ways of storing file records on disk. File records are grouped into disk blocks and

can be fixed length or variable length, spanned or unspanned, and of the same record type or mixed types.

We discussed the file header, which describes the record formats and keeps track of the disk addresses of

the file blocks. Information in the file header is used by system software accessing the file records. Then

we presented a set of typical commands for accessing individual file records and discussed the concept of

the current record of a file. We discussed how complex record search conditions are transformed into simple

search conditions that are used to locate records in the file.

In-text Questions
What is a record?
In-text Answer
A record is the collection of related fields

4.0 Self-Assessment Questions

1. What are the reasons for having variable-length records?

2. What types of separator characters are needed for each?

3.Discuss the techniques for allocating file blocks on disk.

4. What is the difference between a file organization and an access method?

 5.0 Additional Activities (Videos, Animations & out of Class Activities)

5.0 Additional Activities

Visit you-tube add on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR0jg0eQsZA Watch the on
database concept.

6.0 Reference/Further Reading

UNESCO-NIGERIA TECHNICAL & VOCATIONAL EDUCATION REVITALISATION PROJECT-

PHASE II. (2008). DATABASE DESIGN 1 COURSE CODE: COM322. December, 1–86.
Fundamentals of Database Systems by Ramez Elmasri and Shamkat B. Navathe six ditions