It may be that objects are being stored where no relevant relation exists between the objects. For example, the Registrar's Office must store information about students and these records must be stored in a particular order; however, there are no relevant relations between the students which will be necessary or useful. For example, if the record of a student who has a UW Student ID Number 20123456 and who was born on January 23rd, 1991 is being accessed, there is neither the need to access the next largest UW Student ID Number nor is there a need to access a student who has birthday on the 24th.

Not having a relationship to deal with actually allows some of the most optimal average run times for those operations relevant to objects within a container and no additional memory is required to store the relation.

Operations

Operations on a container where no relation exists between the objects being stored are simply the operations on a general container:

• Accessing the number of objects in the container,
• Determining if the container is empty,
• Inserting a new object into the container,
• Determining if an object is in the container (membership),
• Removing an object from the container, and
• Removing all objects from (clearing) the container.