Thread: Should I use vector or list for a database system?

Originally Posted by weml

From the file I shall read the entire vector/list and work with it to add , remove or edit record and then again write the entire vector/list to the file again. I figured it would stop all the weird things that happen when directly working with the file. Is it an efficient way ?Or is it totally unnecessary ?Is there a better way?

Your idea would be feasible if there are sufficiently few records.

Is implementing (by yourself) efficient storage, retrieval and other operations for the underlying database system your main concern? If not, I suggest providing a console based front end of your choice for something like SQLite.

For few records (where you can read everything into memory and back to disk quickly) and where you don't need flexibility of a full database, you might consider simply using a vector, a list or a map and serializing this to disk and back. A good serialization library that supports this easily is cereal.
If you do need something more efficient, consider using SQLite as a database backend as laserlight suggests. Though I haven't used it, you might want to check out sqlpp11, as well. This is a front-end in C++ for database systems, SQLite among them. It is written in modern C++ with typical C++ idioms.