Comment by gnufx

Long ago we had a contrasting experience. It had been assumed that the implemented "database" (not a general database) for storing nuclear spectroscopy data was needed because the filesystem was too slow. However, one of our "physicist programmers" decided to do the experiment, and found it wasn't so, and the system was re-designed around directories of files of spectra.

On the other hand, the other facility in the lab had consulted Logica on storage of similar data, who viewed x-y (or multiple dependent variables) data as tables suitable for storage in their early RDB, Rapport. That wasn't actually used in production, and the storage format for the table model was unfortunately usually mangled by data acquisition systems writing files.