Neco 2019 Computer Studies Question 5

A secondary school plans to keep a permanent electronic file of its students' academic records. Each student record will contain the following fields: - Student ID: a numeric identifier that can range from 0 to 99,999. - Full name: up to 30 characters. - Date of birth: stored as year, month and day. - Three subject scores (Mathematics, English, Science), each an integer from 0 to 100. The school decides to store the records in a flat‑file using fixed‑length fields. Assume the following storage conventions: * 1 character = 1 byte. * A numeric integer (such as the scores) occupies 2 bytes. * The date of birth is stored using three separate 1‑byte fields (year, month, day). Answer the following: (a) Determine the minimum number of bytes required for a single student record. (b) If the school expects to have 2,000 students, calculate the total storage space required for the flat‑file (in megabytes, 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes). Show your working. (c) Briefly discuss two advantages of using a relational database management system (RDBMS) instead of the flat‑file method for storing these records.