The role of data structure in software development?

I'm sorry but your question is too vague for a good answer.

Data structure needs to be relative... there should be redundancy to protect data from loss or corruption, yet there should be NO redundancy in reports.

Most people have no idea what that means and just use spreadsheets. Unfortunately, they end up paying the price.

Data structures are what algorithms operate on. Together they form programs.

I would have to say that being its not a specific question. It allows the programmer to easily code nested statements & use sub routines. Which, in turn, makes debugging much easier. The structure of the data in a program also determines how fast the code will execute.

In a database, if there was no data structure, it would be more time consuming to locate records with the proper data fields that are being requested.

too vague. what do you mean by data structure? do you mean linked lists? doubly linked lists? queues? stacks?

well if you mean those, then those data structures actually help programs work on data. they act as a sort of special storage space for bits of data enabling the program to work on those bits of data in a sequence which will give out the final result

A data structure is a model of some data you want software to operate on. So the data structure should be a collection of related kinds of data. For instance it could be an inventory item and have such elements as item number, name, number on hand, reorder level and cost. A whole bunch of these items would be handled in a list or some other collection. So how the individual items are handled and the collection as a whole would help determine the design of the program. It would also influence what language you wanted to use, GUI design, database selection and other libraries.