Description

In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that are usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data it is an algebraic structure about data. Data structures serve as the basis for abstract data types ADT. The ADT defines the logical form of the data type. The data structure implements the physical form of the data type. Different types of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks. For example, relational databases commonly use B-tree indexes for data retrieval while compiler implementations usually use hash tables to look up identifiers.

Data structures provide a means to manage large amounts of data efficiently for uses such as large databases and internet indexing services. Usually, efficient data structures are key to designing efficient algorithms. Some formal design methods and programming languages emphasize data structures, rather than algorithms, as the key organizing factor in software design. Data structures can be used to organize the storage and retrieval of information stored in both main memory and secondary memory. Data structures are generally based on the ability of a computer to fetch and store data at any place in its memory, specified by a pointer a bit string, representing a memory address, that can be itself stored in memory and manipulated by the program. Thus, the array and record data structures are based on computing the addresses of data items with arithmetic operations, while the linked data structures are based on storing addresses of data items within the structure itself. The implementation of a data structure usually requires writing a set of procedures that create and manipulate instances of that structure. The efficiency of a data structure cannot be analysed separately from those operations. This observation motivates the theoretical concept of an abstract data type, a data structure that is defined indirectly by the operations that may be performed on it, and the mathematical properties of those operations (including their space and time cost. An array is a number of elements in a specific order, typically all of the same type depending on the language, individual elements may either all be forced to be the same type, or may be of almost any type. Elements are accessed using an integer index to specify which element is required. Typical implementations allocate contiguous memory words for the elements of arrays but this is not always a necessity. Arrays may be fixed-length or resizable. A linked list also just called list is a linear collection of data elements of any type, called nodes, where each node has itself a value, and points to the next node in the linked list. The principal advantage of a linked list over an array is that values can always be efficiently inserted and removed without relocating the rest of the list. Certain other operations, such as random access to a certain element, are however slower on lists than on arrays.

Thanks &regards

 John Gresham 

Journal coordinator

International Journal of Innovative Research In Computer and Communication Engineering