The Record

The fundamental unit of a relational database is the record.

To understand records, we first need to understand entities. An entity is any real-world object, person, or concept that we want to store information about. In a library database, for example, each individual book is an entity.

• In a database, every unique entity is represented by a corresponding record.
• The specific details or characteristics of an entity are stored in fields. For a book entity, the fields might include its title, author, and genre.
• Records that describe the same type of entity (and therefore have the same types of fields) are grouped together into tables. All the individual book records together form the Books table.
• Visually, each record is a row, and each field is a column.

Example: The Books Table

Let's look at the Books table from our library example.

In this table:

• There are four records, one for each book.
• The first record (for "The Hobbit") is the first row of data.
• The table has five fields: BookID, Title, AuthorID, Genre, and PublishedYear.