Data structures || Need and Advantages of DS - Theguiderworld

What is data structure and its types

Data structure

What is data structure ? Data structure can be known as the group of data elements which gives an efficient approach for organising and storing the data in a logical or mathematical way in a computer system. 

The data strucures are used widely in almost every field of computer science i.e in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Operating System, graphics, and much more. Few examples of Data Structure can be Arrays, Linked Lists, Queue, Stack, etc. 

It helps in the handling of the data in an efficient way resulting in increase in the performance of the software or the program,  as the main function of software is to retrieve and store the data of the user as fast as possible.

Basic Terminology

Data Structures can be known as the structuring of any program or software. It is difficult to select the perfect data structure for any program or software for any programmer. The basic terminology used in Data Structures are as followed.

Data : 

Data can be defined as an elementary value or information that is stored by a computer system. This information can be in form of text documents, audioclips, images, or other types of data.

Information:

Information can be known as the well organised and classifed data which can be accessible and has a meaningful values for the users. It can also be known as the processed data on whose basis we can take various decisions and actions.

Record :

Record as the name indicates it can be defined as the collection of various data items or entities. Lets take an example of student entity, it will consist of name, class, roll no, address and marks together forming a record for the students.

Fields:

A field can be known as the user interface design for entering the data. The data is stored in the form of entity inside a part of records.

File:

A File can be known as the object on a computer system to store data, information or records of a particular entity. The data is stored in one unit and can be identified and accessed using the filename.\

Need of Data Structures

As in todays time applcations and softwares are getting complexed day by day due to the increasing amount of data , which arise some problems like :

• Processor Speed

• Data Searching

• Handling Multiple Requests

Processor speed:

As the amount of data is growing day by day to billions of files. To handle this large amount of data, high speed processing is required, but because of large data processors may fail to deal with this data.

Data Searching:

Data Search as the name indicates means searching of data in any program or queue. Lets take an example of 100 items kept in a system and we want to search for a particular item, then the program or application will have to traverse those 100 items everytime. Then it will result in slowing down of that process.

Handling Multiple Requests:

Suppose thousands of users are searching for a particular data on a web server at the same time, then ther are circumstances that  it will give load to the server resulting in the failure of the server.

Advantages of Data Structure:

• Efficiency

• Abstraction

• Reusability

Efficiency :

Efficiency as the name indicates it means how much efficient is the particular program to carry out proccesses. Lets suppose take an example of searching any item in any record, in this case if we organise our data in an array form then we will have to search for that element by traversing to each and every element. Therefore, using array will not be efficient here. But their many other data structures which can make this searching more efficent like for eg. binary search tree, hash tables or ordered array.

Abstraction :

The client program uses the given data structure through the interface only, without getting into the details of implementations. In Data Structure the abstract datatype is used to provide the level of abstraction.

Reusability : 

Reusability means reusing anything in other programs to reduce the work of rewriting. Data Structures are reusable i.e ones we have used any data structure then we reuse it at any other place. Implementation of hte Data Structure can be compiled in libraries and can used by different clients.