The building block of a database is the record. A
record is a collection of related data treated as a single entity. For
example, a hockey trading card could be called a record: it brings
together the name, photograph, team, and statistics of one player. Using
database terms, each of these related pieces of information is called a
field: each hockey card “record” has a name field, a photograph field, a
team field, and various statistic fields!
A collection of records that share the same fields is called a table
because this kind of information can easily be presented in table
format: each column represents a field and each row represents a record.
In fact, the word column is synonymous with the word field, and the word
row is synonymous with the word record.
A database can contain more than one table, each with a unique name.
These tables can be related or independent from one another.
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