There is no denying that computing technology has permanently changed how businesses operate around the world. Information that was once stored in warehouses full of filing cabinets can now be accessed instantaneously at the click of a mouse. Similarly, orders placed by customers in foreign countries can be processed immediately on the floor of a manufacturing facility.
Even though much of this information had migrated to corporate mainframe databases by the late 1970s and 1980s, offices still operated in a rigid batch-processing environment. If a query needed to be performed, an employee had to notify the Management Information Systems (MIS) department, and the requested data was delivered only after the mainframe completed its scheduled runs.
This slow approach shifted drastically with the development of the relational database model, alongside two key technologies that led to the rapid growth of modern client/server database systems:
- The Personal Computer (PC): Inexpensive, easy-to-use applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect empowered employees to create documents and manage data quickly and accurately. As the price of advanced systems fell, users became accustomed to continuous upgrades to keep pace with rapid technological changes.
- The Local Area Network (LAN): LAN technology integrated offices across the world. While users were previously restricted to passive terminal connections to a central mainframe, they could now store word processing files locally within an office and access them from any computer attached to the network.
The shift toward user-friendly desktop computing accelerated further after the Apple Macintosh introduced a friendly graphical user interface (GUI), making computing accessible to non-technical staff.
With data decentralised across networks rather than locked in a single mainframe, efficient organisation became critical. In this modern client/server environment, the most vital decision for a database designer—after choosing the hardware platform and the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)—is the structure of the data tables. Decisions made at this design stage heavily impact system performance and programming complexity later in the development process. To ensure efficiency, designers rely on normalisation: the systematic process of separating data into distinct, unique, and non-redundant sets to ensure maximum speed and data integrity across the network.
