Unordered (Heap) Files

• Simplest file structure: contains records in no particular order.

• As file grows and shrinks, disk pages are allocated and de-allocated.

• To support record-level operations, we must:

  • keep track of the pages in a file
  • keep track of free space on pages
  • keep track of the records on a page

• There are many alternatives for keeping track of this.

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