Flat File Database / Spreadsheet
Know that the term \"flat file database\" describes a very simple database model, where all the information is stored in plain text files, one database record per line. Each record is divided into fields using delimiters or at fixed column positions. The data is \"flat\", as in a sheet of paper, as compared to amore complex model such as a relational database.
Flat file databases are very handy when every record contains the same attributes with simple values. This is true of simple tables such as a list of names and phone numbers or tables of scientific data with one key attribute and one or more simple descriptive attributes such as the example of chromosome data from UW-FHCRC (http://pga.gs.washington.edu).
The main problem with flat file databases is that they don\'t handle redundancy very well. If one or more of the entities in the database have the same value for an attribute, and that value is a complex value like \"publisher information\"......
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