ISAM stands for Indexed Sequential Access Method, a method for indexing data for fast retrieval. ISAM was originally developed by IBM for mainframe computers. Today the term is used for several related concepts:

In an ISAM system, data is organized into records which are composed of fixed length fields. Records are stored sequentially, originally to speed access on a tape system. A secondary set of hash tables known as indexes contain "pointers" into the tables, allowing individual records to be retrieved without having to search the entire data set. This is a departure from the contemporaneous navigational databases, in which the pointers to other data were stored inside the records themselves. The key improvement in ISAM is that the indexes are small and can be searched quickly, thereby allowing the database to access only the records it needs. Additionally modifications to the data do not require changes to other data, only the table and indexes in question.