With a FLAM cluster, the 3 parts making up a FLAM archive

  • directory (which units does the archive consist of?)
  • contentlist (which segments are contained in a unit?)
  • segment list

are managed in separate files. This increases performance of FLAM archives, particularly with updates and random accesses. This principle resembles that of IBM's VSAM data sets for host computers.

A cluster can be exported to a FLAMFILE and vice versa. In fact, the FLAMFILE is just a serialized form of a FLAM cluster and hence just a different representation of the same data.
