Could anyone please suggest a simple but useful programming exercise in order to get some exposure and experience in programming something with different access levels (Disk Level, File Level, Block I/O) in mind? Would it give a reasonably good experience if I simply try to write a  small program that uses RandomAccessFile and fiddle with it?
But what should I make the program to do to get the best out of the exercise? Thank you in advance.

cysun wrote:

Create a file that consists of several blocks (e.g. a 32KB file, assuming block size 4KB). Try read/write a character in 1000 random locations in the file using either RandomAccessFile or block I/O (like the implementation in SimpleDB). You can test the two approaches and see if the block I/O approach is significantly faster.

Thank you, Dr, Sun!