Combinatorial filing systems for records with unequal numbers of attribute values are constructed in terms of cyclic groups. The notion of group-invariant sets of queries is defined, which includes sets of queries of fixed order. The buckets which are constructed from a unique decomposition of a group-invariant set of queries, and the corresponding subbuckets, can be represented in a simple way in terms of the parameters of the group representation. This leads to effective storage and retrieval algorithms which do not require scanning lists of buckets or records. The total number of buckets required and the redundancy of a cyclic filing system are usually less than those of the corresponding systems constructed in terms of combinatorial configurations. Cyclic intersection systems are constructed to handle the case in which the set of queries is not group invariant.
