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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 subset of data extracted from one or more tables is called a
recordset (or a DataSet in ASP.NET). A recordset is also a table
because it’s a collection of records that share the same
columns. For example, a hockey team roster listing the names and
positions of the players could be called a recordset: it
consists of a subset of all the possible information about the
players, including goals, assists, penalty minutes, and so on. |
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