ADVANTAGES of INDEXED FILES
1. Quite easy to process,
2. With proper selection of a key field, records in a large file can be searched and accessed in very quickly.
3. Any field of the records can be used as the key. The key field can be numerical or alphanumerical.
DISADVANTAGES of INDEXED FILES
1. Extra data structures have to be maintained (the COBOL run-time modules take care of these and it is not the programmers' concern). These extra data structures maintained on the disk can use up much disk space, especially for long key values.
2. The indexed files have to be reorganized from time time to get rid of deleted records and improve performance that gets gradually decreased with addition of new records.
1. Quite easy to process,
2. With proper selection of a key field, records in a large file can be searched and accessed in very quickly.
3. Any field of the records can be used as the key. The key field can be numerical or alphanumerical.
DISADVANTAGES of INDEXED FILES
1. Extra data structures have to be maintained (the COBOL run-time modules take care of these and it is not the programmers' concern). These extra data structures maintained on the disk can use up much disk space, especially for long key values.
2. The indexed files have to be reorganized from time time to get rid of deleted records and improve performance that gets gradually decreased with addition of new records.