What is each record in a database called?

A database is organised using a set of key components. These include:

• entities - each recorded item
• attributes - details about the entity
• field - columns used to capture attributes
• record - one row of details about an entity
• table - a set of fields and records
• primary key - unique number for an entity

This is an example table of a flat-file database. The entities are films and the attributes are details about the films:

Table

The table contains all of the fields and the records for one type of entity. A database may contain more than one table.

Records

Records contain a collection of data for each entity, usually recorded as a row in the table.

Fields

The column headings are called the fields. Each field contains a different attribute. For every entity, a unit of data will be entered into each field. Each column might require different data types. For example, the 'Title' column will require data entered as text and the 'Certificate' column will need data entered as numbers.

Unit of data

Each individual piece of data entered is a unit of data. These units are also called data elements.

The primary key contains a unique identifier for each record. To make each record in a database unique we normally assign them a primary key. Even if a record is deleted from a database, the primary key will not be used again. The primary key can be automatically generated and will normally just be a unique number or mix of numbers and letters.