These are the disadvantages of File-Oriented System:
(i) Data redundancy and Inconsistency: Since files and application programs are formed by different programmers in excess of a long period of time, files are likely to be have different formats and the programs might be written in several programming languages. Moreover, same piece of information might be duplicated in several places. This unemployment leads to higher storage and access rate. In addition, it leads to data inconsistency such as the various copies of same data may no longer agree.
(ii) Difficulty in accessing data: the conventional file processing environments do not allow necessary data to be retrieved in convenient and efficient manner. Better data retrieval system has to be developed for general use.
(iii) Data isolation: Because data is scattered in a range of files, and files might be in different formats, it is tough to write new application programs to retrieve appropriate data.
(iv) Concurrent access anomalies: In order to improve overall performance of the system and obtain faster response time, many schemes allow multiple users to inform the data. In such an environment, interaction of parallel updates might result in inconsistent data.
(v) Security problems: Not every user of database system must be able to access all data. For example, in banking system, payroll personnel require only that part of the database that has information about various bank employees. They do not want access to information about the customer accounts. It is difficult to enforce security const rains.
(vi) Integrity problems: The data values stored in the database should satisfy certain types of consistency constraints. Such as the balance of a bank account may never fall below a prescribed amount. These constraints are forced in system by adding appropriate code in different application programs. When new restraints are added, it would difficult to change programs to implement them. The problem is compounded when constraints involve quite a few data items for dissimilar accounts.
(vii) Atomicity problem: A computer system like any other mechanical or electrical device is subject to failure. In many applications, it is vital to ensure that once a failure has occurred and has been detected, data will be restored to the consistent state existed prior to the failure.