Data-Centric Apps

Because the platform is centered around a database, it allows you to write apps that are data-centric. A data-centric app is an application that is based on structured, consistent information such as you find in a database or XML file. We can find these data-centric apps everywhere, in small desktop databases like Microsoft Access or FileMaker, all the way to the huge systems running on database management systems like Oracle or MySQL. Unlike applications that are built around unstructured data, like plain text documents or HTML files, data-centric apps make it easy to control, access, and manage data.

For example, consider an exercise such as trying to determine the total sales for a month from a set of Microsoft Word-based contracts versus a set of contracts in a simple database. Whereas it takes a lot of effort to open each Word document, find the contract total, and then add them all together, if this data is stored in the database of a data-centric app, we can more efficiently get the same result by issuing a single query.

While most people don't need a data-centric application to keep track of anything other than contacts, photos, or music, companies of all sizes constantly need to query and aggregate their large amounts of data to make fast business decisions. As a result, the data-centric nature of the Force.com platform makes it the perfect platform to build and host business applications.