ISAM

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ISAM, an acronym for Indexed Sequential Access Method, is a method for creating, maintaining, and manipulating computer files of data so that records can be retrieved sequentially or randomly by one or more keys. Indexes of key fields are maintained to achieve fast retrieval of required file records in indexed files. IBM originally developed ISAM for mainframe computers, but implementations are available for most computer systems.

The term ISAM is used for several related concepts:

• The IBM ISAM product and the algorithm it employs.^[1]
• A database system where an application developer directly uses an application programming interface to search indexes in order to locate records in data files. In contrast, a relational database uses a query optimizer which automatically selects indexes.^[2]
• An indexing algorithm that allows both sequential and keyed access to data.^[3] Most databases use some variation of the B-tree for this purpose, although the original IBM ISAM and VSAM implementations did not do so.
• Most generally, any index for a database. Indexes are used by almost all databases.