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Sequential access compared to random access. Sequential access is a term describing a group of elements (such as data in a memory array or a disk file or on magnetic-tape data storage) being accessed in a predetermined, ordered sequence. It is the opposite of random access, the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence as easily and ...
Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) is a method for creating, maintaining, and manipulating computer files of data so that records can be retrieved sequentially or randomly by one or more keys. Indexes of key fields are maintained to achieve fast retrieval of required file records in indexed files .
Random access compared to sequential access. Random access (more precisely and more generally called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any datum from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any other, no matter how many elements may be in the set.
[1]: 5 Records are accessed based on their ordinal position in the file (relative record number, RRN). [1]: 29 For example, the desired record to be accessed might be the 42nd record in the file out of 999 total. The concept of RRDS is similar to sequential access method, but it can access with data in random access and dynamic access.
Concurrent data structures are significantly more difficult to design and to verify as being correct than their sequential counterparts. The primary source of this additional difficulty is concurrency, exacerbated by the fact that threads must be thought of as being completely asynchronous: they are subject to operating system preemption, page faults, interrupts, and so on.
In IBM mainframe operating systems, Basic sequential access method (BSAM) [1] is an access method to read and write datasets sequentially. BSAM is available on OS/360, OS/VS2, MVS, z/OS, and related operating systems. BSAM is used for devices that are naturally sequential, such as punched card readers, punches, line printers, and magnetic tape.
In either case, significant amounts of code to manage records must be provided in protected routines to ensure file integrity. An alternative to a Record-oriented file is a stream file, in which the file system treats a file as an unstructured sequence of bytes. The applications may, but need not, impose a record structure.
In computer science, read–modify–write is a class of atomic operations (such as test-and-set, fetch-and-add, and compare-and-swap) that both read a memory location and write a new value into it simultaneously, either with a completely new value or some function of the previous value.