Data Records

Data record positions are absolute byte offsets from the beginning of the data file, where the first byte of the file is at offset zero. For fixed record length data files, the byte offsets corresponding to the beginning of each record are guaranteed to be a multiple of the record length specified for the data file at the time of creation. Therefore, a data record position in a fixed record length data file can be converted to a relative record number by dividing the data record position by the record length.