You can use a filing cabinet to quickly solve your paper storage problems, but it knows nothing of the type of papers your are stuffing in them.
When it comes time to retrieve your papers, you need to have had them organized in a fashion that makes it easy to look them up.
You're the only one that knows your data and how you need to look them up, and it's up to you to decide what goes in a file folder, how to label them and sort them.
You kind of need to know ahead of time how you are going to look your files up, otherwise you are going to have a hard time finding them.
RDBMSs are like a toolset of best archiving practices implemented digitally and comes with data integrity and a query language built in.
Some different types of storage may look sexier, but come with trade offs. In the end you have to live with your tool choices.
I'm not complaining that you have to build a schema, just that, once you've done so, it should be relatively hands-off, and it often isn't. But maybe I'm biased because I'm subject to a constant stream of customers' issues.
When it comes time to retrieve your papers, you need to have had them organized in a fashion that makes it easy to look them up.
You're the only one that knows your data and how you need to look them up, and it's up to you to decide what goes in a file folder, how to label them and sort them.
You kind of need to know ahead of time how you are going to look your files up, otherwise you are going to have a hard time finding them.
RDBMSs are like a toolset of best archiving practices implemented digitally and comes with data integrity and a query language built in.
Some different types of storage may look sexier, but come with trade offs. In the end you have to live with your tool choices.