Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, developers wanting to exchange data between applications used binary formatted data, hard-coded text field lengths, or delimited text files. Much parsing and error checking was involved. It was tedious...
Who remembers Object Databases ? At one time they were going to dominate the programming world. But, as with a lot of over-hyped technology (Lisp, AI, ADA, Virtual Reality) they were destined to a small niche segment of the market. Relational Databases...