Excel used to be the poor schmuck’s database, with spreadsheets that just sort of sat there. You could create something more sophisticated with LOOKUP functions, but they were a huge hassle to set up.

Excel possesses formidable database powers. Creating a relational database starts with a Master table that links it to subordinates, called (awkwardly) Slave, Child, or Detail tables. Before we dive ...

Inside a relational database management system, the princi­pal persisted data structure is considered a logical relation. Operations performed against that data within the RDBMS result in a logical ...