Write briefly the drawbacks of the traditional file approach.

The drawbacks of a traditional file approach are as follows:

Data Redundancy
Data Redundancy means same information is duplicated in several files. This makes data redundancy.

Data Inconsistency
Data Inconsistency means different copies of the same data are not matching. This occurs as the result of the update operations that are not updating the same data stored at different places.

Security Problems
File processing system does not provide adequate security on data. Sometimes it is required to provide different types of access to data for different users. Such type of security options are not available in file processing system.

Other drawbacks are:

• Program Data Dependency
• Lack of Flexibility, and
• Integrity Problems

What is meant by redundancy?

Redundancy means the appearance of the same data factor in more than one field or table of data, or including a data factor as a separate entity when it can be easily inferred from information in existing data fields. This repetition of the data can cause some distortions and anomalies in the results. For example, the data of one student appears in two files i.e. Student File and Library File. This is known as data redundancy.