Problems with Flat Files
Need to write a program to get at the data
- Too hard to get to the data
- Time consuming and expensive, even for simple reports
- Too easy to get to the data
- It was difficult to control access to the files
- People could change data if they could write a program
- Salary data, grade data, bank account balances
- Data dependency
- Changing data format means you need to change all programs that read the data
- Zip code changed from 5 to 9 digits
- Don’t know which programs are using the data