Field
A field is an area (within a record) reserved for a specific piece of data. Examples: customer number, customer name, street address, city, state, phone, current balance.
Fields are defined by:
- Field name
- Data type
- Character: text, including such things as telephone numbers and zip codes
- Numeric: numbers which can be manipulated using math operators
- Date: calendar dates which can be manipulated mathematically
- Logical: True or False, Yes or No
- Field size
- Amount of space reserved for storing data
Record
A record is the collection of values for all the fields pertaining to one entity: i.e. a person, product, company, transaction, etc.
Table
A table is a collection of related records. For example, employee table, product table, customer, and orders tables.
In a table, records are represented by rows and fields are represented as columns.
Database
A database is a collection of related tables. It can also include other objects, such as queries, forms, and reports. The structure of a database is the relationships between its tables.
