Databases are an essential part of the modern living. Every technology we use in our everyday life relies on data, and relational databases are the most common way of keeping that data structured.

In the early years of databases, every application stored data in its own structure. When that data had to be used by a different application, the developers were required to analyze the structure in order to find the data they needed. This was a pretty inefficient way, and hard for maintenance and optimization. The relational database model was then designed to solve this problem

The relational data model provided a standard way of representing and querying data that could be used by any application. The advantage in the relational database model is in its use of tables, which are an intuitive, efficient, and flexible way to store and access structured information. One aditional advantage and strength of the relational model which emerged over time is the structured query langage (SQL), which based on relational algebra, provides a consistent mathematical language that makes it easier to improve the performance of the queries.