Data Base Organisation

Within the context of an organisation, data are related to one another in a rather complex manner. At any given time, an individual user is concerned with only a subset of these relationships, but a data base, wishing to serve all users, must represent all their facets. This can only be achieved by using complex data structures. In fact the performance of a data base is critically dependent on the data structures it can support and the flexibility such structures can provide. This is why data organisation is such a key issue in data base design. In this chapter we shall discuss the basic problems of data base organisation and examine their solutions.