Disadvantages of File Processing System: Keeping organization information in a file processing system has some disadvantages including the followings,
- Data Redundancy & Inconsistency: As the files are created by different programmers, there is a huge chance of data redundancy which is responsible for unnecessary storage and access cost. This may also lead to data inconsistency where information may not get changed in all files at a time.
- Difficulty in Accessing Data: In a file processing system, to retrieve a significant type of data from all the files, the programmers have to create separate applications. This is a bothering thing to be done for each type of data.
- Integrity Problems: Sometimes we get the necessity to limit data values to a limitation. Such as, we want to limit the lowest amount of an account to $25. In file processing system, we can apply this one time for all the files and the next time if we want to change it the whole program gets huge complexity to handle.
- Atomicity Problem: Supposing that, we are making a transaction like subtracting some amount from an account and adding the amount to another account. It may that a power failure or any kind of trouble of this type may occur before the transaction has been done. Thus it will cause big problems. In file processing system we can not handle this problem that a transaction has to be totally completed or not at all.
- Security Problems: Not every user should be able to use the whole database system. Such as someone may only need to see a part of the database not the whole at all. But ensuring such constraints is difficult in file processing system.