Hi Joe,
It would be much better if you presented some of your ideas first, and then others can comment on them.
But as a general guideline:
You have two options here:
add a new record to the end of the database, ignoring any deleted records.
(The instructions only tell us that the create() method can possibly reuse a deleted record, not that it must 
)search for a deleted record, then overwrite that record with the newly created record. You can use NIO if you like (and if you have never used it before, this could be a good project for you to learn how to use it). If you are going to use NIO, then I would suggest that you use it for
all your I/O work on the database - don't try and limit it to one or two methods.
As for whether this method should be synchronized or not: that depends
. Are you going to have only one instance of the Data class, or multiple instances? Are you going to have your I/O operations in the Data class itself or in a helper class? The answers to these questions may change where you need to put synchronization, and whether you synchronize an entire method or just a block within a method.
Regards, Andrew
