1: Determine when a sequential file is more useful than a database.?
2: Differentiate between a flat file and a relational database?
3: I definitely agree with the minimalist approach when it comes to development. If you remember the employee tax assignment there were a couple of approaches students could have taken to arrive at the same answer. Many students in the past took a modular approach for each salary range to compute the taxes. However, you can isolate one equation to compute the tax and excess by setting the variables conditionally based on the salary range thus eliminating excess code. If your equation happened to have an error you would only have to fix it once versus fixing it in each salary range. Recognizing that what you did today may not be right tomorrow can open you up for optimizing your code like in this example. Any thoughts?