Concept from the point of view of computing and technologies.
1 In general, physical structure describes definitions and concepts that focus on the physical details of a device or the physical way data is stored on a storage device. Contrast with the logical structure.
For example, the description of the physical parts of a hard drive or the parts of a computer are examples of descriptions of physical structures.
The detailed description of how certain information is stored also refers to the physical structure. A very simple example, if we describe that in a file the first 100 bytes correspond to format information, the next 200 bytes to data on creation dates, the next 500 bytes information on pointers to other files, etc., we are referring to the physical structure of a file. Very important to know later how to store and treat that file.
Another example, if we say that some information is stored in 5 files, with the description of what each file contains and their names, etc., it is another description of the physical structure of how we store certain data.
One final example, when we receive emails on our computer how are those emails stored? a file for each file received and sent? all grouped in the same file and structured in some way? Will each sent mail, received mail, spam folder have its own file? These are definitions of the physical structure of the email database and, in this case, will be given by the implementation decided by the programmers of the client or email program.
The description of that physical structure is very important to achieve consistency in data creation, storage, modification, and retrieval.
1.1 In databases, the physical structure refers to the way of physically storing data, referring to the form of storage and the physical methods of accessing the data.
For more information see: Database physical scheme.
related terminology
logical structure
Quote the definition:
Alegsa.com.ar (2019). definition of physical structure – ALEGSA 2019-03-28 url: https:///Dec/estructura fisica.php
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