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Possible Duplicate:
What are important points when designing a (binary) file format?
I am going to develop a program which will store data in file.
The file can be big. The data in the file is basically made up with variable length records. And I need random access to the records.
I just want to read some resouces/books about how to design the structure of a data file. But I can’t find any yet.
Any suggestion is much appreciated.
The problem you describe is a central theme of Database Theory.
Any decent text on the subject should give you some good ideas. The standard text from uni was:
Fundamentals of Database Systems- Elmasari & Nava (PDF) (Amazon)
Another approach is to use a memory mapped array of structs, take a look at my bountied answer to a similar question
Yet another approach is to use a binary protocol like Google protobuf and “send” your data to the file when writing and “receive” it when writing.