The advantages of tables, are that you can visually or geometrically read the contents easily, whether it is reading a row and only a row, or wether it's reading the contents of a column sequentally.<p>While we had spreadsheets since the 90s, which visually allow the user to create tables. Relational database take this concept to the very architecture in both the storage format and as in the data retrieval mechanisms.<p>Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields, and by extension each row has a fixed length. This is equivalent to the horizontal length of a column, but in terms of bytes. This allows for quickly finding the nth row of a table, or the ith field of a column.<p>Query languages formalize the algorithm for reading a traditional table. Going row by row checking the description of each transaction (Select * from table), comparing it to our searched term (where description = salary), then going to the column with the destination account, and looking for that in another table with a similar process.<p>Just that, interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different types of accounting software.