Actually, the directory structure approach isn't a bad solution. If you can still find some literature, take a look at discussions of the internals of the old dBase II or FoxPro (DOS version). I think IBM's DB2 also uses a hierarchical directory structure but I'm not sure about that. I did a fair amount of that kind of work in the eighties.

Although I'm a little hazy on the details now, I had a layout similar to what you described. Under a parent "db" directory, I had subdirectories for each database which contained fixed length text files for the tables. I also had batch files and other programs for data extraction and rudimentary reporting. I didn't know about SQL back then. I used fixed length records so that I could index each row based on its position in the file. Back when PC's were <4MHz reading through a file line by line could be a lot slower than a single seek to specific byte position in a file. I believe I used a single "metadata" (I didn't call it that) directory to store info about the tables. I had a subdir in the metadata directory for each database with files having the same table names containing the col structure and the like. For a while, before I discovered dBase II, I used an ISAM implementation for indexing (in BASIC no less). I believe I got it out of PC Magazine.

Now that I think of it, PC Mag had a lot of stuff like that back then. Perhaps you could try their archives from, say, 1983 - 1987. I'm sorry that I can't give you too many specifics. My implmentations were pretty primative, I thought, but I do remember being pleased when my layout matched the dBaseII implementation.

Good luck

PJ
unspoken but ever present -- use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics; (if needed)

In reply to Re: (Real) Database Design by periapt
in thread (Real) Database Design by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.