This will lead to wastage of space and redundancy or replication of data's, which may lead to confusion, sharing of data among various users is not possible, data inconsistency may occur. These files will not be having any inter-relationship among the data's stored in these files. Therefore in traditional file processing every user will be defining their own constraints and implement the files needed for the applications. In database approach, a single repository of data is maintained that is defined once and then accessed by many users.

The fundamental characteristic of database approach is that the database system not only contains data's but it contains complete definition or description of the database structure and constraints. These definitions are stored in a system catalog, which Fax List contains the information about the structure and definitions of the database. The information stored in the catalog is called the metadata, it describes the primary database. Hence this approach will work on any type of database for example, insurance database, Airlines, banking database.

Finance details, and Enterprise information database. But in traditional file processing system the application is developed for a specific purpose and they will access specific database only. The other main characteristic of the database is that it will allow multiple users to access the database at the same time and sharing of data is possible. The database must include concurrency control software to ensure that several users trying to update the same data at the same time, it should maintain in a controlled manner. In file system approach many programmers will be creating files over a long period and various files have different format, in various application languages.