What is a flat file? Ever heard of Flat file databases?
According to wikipedia, Mr. Herman Hollerith was the first person to conceptualize flat file databases way back in 1889. Since then flat has acquired several forms, so much so that now a days I do not hear anybody using flat file for the purpose it was actually meant for i.e. to act as database, to permanently store and process data. Flat files are generally column less files (tables). All different columns are packed together in each row. To distinguish two columns, several ways are adopted. We can broadly define them into two methods. • Using a delimiter.In this case whenever a column data ends, a specific, predetermined character is inserted. This delimiter could be any character e.g. comma (,), Spaces ( ), period (.) etc. It is up to the person storing data, to choose which delimiter he/she wants. • Using fixed length.In AS400, we find this method to distinguish columns. Here, instead of using any ‘delimiter’ to mark end of one type of data, columns are assumed to be of fixed width
