There are several ways of organizing records in files.
- heap file organization. Any record can be placed anywhere in the le where there is space for the record.There is no ordering of records.
- sequential file organization. Records are stored in sequential order, based on the value of the search key of each record.
- hashing file organization. A hash function is computed on some attribute of each record. The result of the function specifies in which block of the file the record should be placed - to be discussed in chapter 11 since it is closely related to the indexing structure.
- clustering file organization. Records of several di erent relations can be stored in the same file. Related records of the di erent relations are stored on the same block so that one I/O operation fetches related records from all the relations.