One of the many ways a relational table differs from the file structures used by pre-relational storage systems is that the tables, rows and columns can have constraints on them. This allows you to reduce the types of bad data that can be loaded into your tables. This lets the database do a lot of the work that you would’ve had to do an application code in the old days (and current times when using file-based storage).
This is an incredible advantage. With COBOL or FORTRAN programs, the data storage platform did nothing to take care of itself. Everything was