Any application of any consequence will require some sort of database in the background to organize and store the raw data. Small, standalone applications can get by with proprietary or desktop databases, but today’s typical business climate calls for one or more industrial-strength Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). Mainframe databases have long been hidden behind a transactional programming boundary for just these reasons. The novelty and flexibility of the modern client-server RDBMS is such that many of these rules have been forgotten or discarded. At ImagineWeb, we believe these rules still occupy an important place, and our designs reflect this opinion.