A brief history of data

If you worked in the mainstream IT industry between the 1970s and early 2000s, it is likely that your organization's data was held either in text-based delimited files, spreadsheets, or nicely structured relational databases. In the case of the latter, data is modeled and persisted in pre-defined, and possibly related, tables representing the various entities found within your organization's data model, for example, according to employee or department. These tables contain rows of data across multiple columns representing the various attributes making up that entity; for example, in the case of employee, typical attributes include first name, last name, and date of birth.