| MCA – 1 SEMESTER | ||||
| MCA 109 | FILE STRUCTURES | |||
| L | T | P | Total | Credits-4 |
| 4 | 0 | 0 | 4 | Duration of Exam- Three hours |
File Processing Operations: Physical and Logical files, Opening, reading & writing and closing files in C, seeking and special characters in files, Physical devices and logical files, file related header files in C.
Secondary Storage : Disks – Organization, tracks, sectors, blocks, capacity, non-data overhead, cost of a disk access, Magnetic tape, disk vs tape, CDROM – CDROM as a file structure, Physical Organization, strengths and weakness of CD-ROMS, Storage hierarchy.
Byte Journey and Buffer Management: File Manager, IO Buffer, IO Processing, Buffer strategies and bottlenecks.
File Structure concepts: A stream file, field structures, reading a stream of fields, record structures and that uses a length indicator, Mixed numbers and characters – use of a hex dump, reading the variable length records from the file.
Managing records in C files: Retrieving records by keys, sequential search, direct access, choosing a record structure and record length, header records, file access and file Organization.
Organizing files for performance: Data compression, reclaiming space – record deletion and storage compaction, deleting fixed – length records for reclaiming space dynamically, deleting variable – length records, space fragmentation and replacement strategies.
Indexing: Index, a Simple index with an entry sequenced file, basic operations on an index, entry sequenced file, indexes that are too large to hold in memory, indexing to provide access by multiple keys, retrieval using combination of secondary keys, improving the secondary index structure – inverted lists
Index Sequential files : Access and prefix B+ trees – Simple index to the sequence set, the content of the index : separators instead of keys, the simple prefix B+ tree, simple prefix B+ tree maintenance, index set block size, internal set block size, the internal structural of index set blocks : a variable order B-tree, loading a simple prefix B+ tree.
Hashing: Collisions in hashing, a simple hashing algorithm, function and record distributions, memory requirements, collision resolution by progressive overflow, buckets, deletion, Extendable hashing: Working of extendable hashing, implantation, deletion, extendable hashing performance
Suggested References
- File Structures – An Object Oriented Approach with C, Muchael J Folk, Bill Zoellick and Greg Riccardi , Addission Wesley
- M.E. Loomis: Data Management and File Structures, 2nd Ed. PHI. 1997.