Either as a programmer or a user, you have probably interacted with a database before. A database is simply a program that makes it easy to store and retrieve data. The data can be numeric, string or more complex objects, such as a video database. A relational database is one implementation of a database—one that organizes data in tables.

A table is made up of rows and COLUMNS. In relational database terminology, the table is called a FILE, a row is called a record and a column is called afield. One of the features of a relational database is that you can retrieve the data by its content. For example, assume you have a relational database with a table made up of two fields, one for names and ANOTHER for PHONE numbers. To retrieve data by content means that you can simply ask the database to retrieve a phone number for a particular name. You do not have to specify an explicit row and column to get a data element.

Either as a programmer or a user, you have probably interacted with a database before. A database is simply a program that makes it easy to store and retrieve data. The data can be numeric, string or more complex objects, such as a video database. A relational database is one implementation of a database—one that organizes data in tables.

A table is made up of rows and columns. In relational database terminology, the table is called a file, a row is called a record and a column is called afield. One of the features of a relational database is that you can retrieve the data by its content. For example, assume you have a relational database with a table made up of two fields, one for names and another for phone numbers. To retrieve data by content means that you can simply ask the database to retrieve a phone number for a particular name. You do not have to specify an explicit row and column to get a data element.