[mmjaa]

Yes indeed, I meant PROGRESS 4GL, which was sort of around before all the "RDBMS" hoopla congealed all this wonderful info into a single art. Its just that your last paragraph really sounded like a quote, near-verbatim, from the very guides published by PROGRESS just for the purposes of educating people on how to make their data relatable .. but of course that is because these are natural laws for databases.

[A_Person]

I remember when 4GLs were the hot new thing. Let's get into those! Oops, nope, forget that, now it's Data Dictionaries, let's get into those instead! Rinse & repeat ...