A flat-file database, long incorporated into the larger Combined System and then persisting onward in the New Jersey clone of the overall system, remained nevertheless essentially a 1989-style flat-file approach to the data it stored.
It was time to break its components out into related files, as requested changes were increasingly awkward and convoluted and finally impossible to implement within the overly simple flat file architecture. So the flat-file Sales Trac gave way to a 3-file relational system: