What is a Flat File?
Much of the information available today is contained in some type of database. Blogs use databases to store posts and user information, discussion sites use them to store information about members, and organizations use them to store useful data for their business — from financial records to customer information. The majority of the databases used today are relational databases that use structured queries to retrieve information and present it to the user. This was not always the case, and flat file databases were created to store information in a non-structured way. A flat file is a collection of data stored and accessed sequentially. A comma separated values (CSV) sheet in Microsoft Excel is a flat file. There are no application specific formats applied to the data contained within the file and only a comma denotes the end of one field in a record. Each record is written on a line in the file, allowing all data for a single record to be stored separately from other records. A flat fi
