Hi Hairy Larry

Some years ago, for my own amusement, I experimented with using the file system as an alternative to a database.

I had an index file containing all keys beginning with "A", another for "B" and so on. This was read sequentially. The key was followed by a long integer which was the file pointer offset in another file containing the actual data - again one for "A", "B" etc.

For fixed length data I was amazed at how fast retrieval was, but it was impractical for anything else. An update that altered the length of just one record in the data file required recalculating all the file pointers in that group.

Also, the lack of a flexible query mechanism limited its use. 

I recall that VAX/VMS used indexed files, but the index and the data were somehow combined into a single file. Super fast retrieval but, again, no query mechanism beyond the record key.

It was an interesting exercise but I've found SQLite to be the ideal way of handling data in standalone applications.