You probably noticed that when you get a bill or bank statement, it uses the current modern Western version of Hindu-Arabic numerals. Yet during the early days of the Renaissance, the accounting firms in Italy often boasted that they kept their records using “God’s own, well understood Roman numerals” for their accounting.
Your choice of how you encode data can be significant. With computers and databases, you have a wide range of options. As a programmer, you will likely be called upon at some time in your career to design and coding scheme for particular application. It would really help