Section I: Fundamentals of Databases
             The value of databases is in their ability to assist organizations of all types to be more efficient while streamlining the core processes they rely on. To accomplish this, databases must be relational in structure (Greene, 2008), supporting the structure of tables, records, and relational associations across multiple physical databases. The mission-critical role databases play in organizations is a direct result of their ability to support multiple, and often conflicting data models. Each variation of a data model also relies on tables that are most often two dimensional in scope. Databases are also capable of providing multi-dimensional analysis of data in cubes and pivot tables (Hanna, 2004). This ability to analyze data and create relational analysis is also the catalyst of a significant shift in the development of databases as the foundation for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) strategies in organizations (Ramakrishnan, Chen, 2007). At the foundation of these advanced analytics functions are the fundamentals of how databases are constructed. Built primarily from records, each with specific fields within them, databases have progressed from hierarchical to relational over the last forty years of their development. In conjunction with these changes in the agility of database architectures to support more relational data structures, there has been an increase in programming languages as well. From assembly-language like commands to the more conversational aspects of SQL Server programming (Greene, 2008) there continues to be a refining of SQL functionality which directly impacts database architecture design.
             SQL programming is also making it possible to integrate several different databases together regardless of their physical location through XML integration and programming. The fundamental aspects of database integration have relied on relational file structures (Pangalos...