Why Use a Relational Database?
Now that it is apparent how applications and business processes can benefit from a functional place to persist and manage data, it is interesting to briefly comment on why a relational database is the best choice (as opposed to other approaches, like a file system, etc.).
There are many applications out there today that use some sort of local storage format to keep data collocated with the application, or to address any of the issues mentioned in the previous section. However, without a database, most of the proposed solutions cannot handle the atomicity of multiple changes (all or nothing, and the management of transactions that may impact each other), and there is no built-in recovery mechanisms in case of a failure ...
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