[...previous answers snipped...]

Here's another way of looking at a true RDBMS vs
Indexed/Networked/Heirarchical database models:

With IMAGE, you can have all of your internal pointers, indexes, and
other "relational" information completely hosed by a catastrophic
failure and you can fully recreate the database from the raw data (well,
with the exception of the bitmaps that show active/free status of
records within a block).

With an RDBMS, the data is scattered around everywhere, and many
"tables" (depending on the specific software) are simply pointers to
the data and not "duplicates" of the data itself (as in Image "keys"
actually duplicating in each affected dataset).  Lose your pointers here
and pray you have a recent backup.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>