Relational databases provide a _framework_ for structuring data and retrieval. And it is an approach informed by decades of practical experience and, well, plai

Relational databases provide a _framework_ for structuring data and retrieval. And it is an approach informed by decades of practical experience and, well, plain mathematics. Would you try to program a web application without a framework? Most of us do, at least once or twice in our career, not thinking about the next guy who needs to maintain our POS spaghetti. Perhaps if you're very bright or experienced you could do a good job structuring a web app from scratch, but in effect you would writing your own framework. Still it makes sense to depend on and learn from the great web frameworks -- rails, django, etc. -- so you can think about getting your real work done. Same goes for sql. It is structured to keep us from being an idiot. Stand on the shoulders of giants.