record Last modified: Friday, November 16, 2001
(1) In database management systems, a complete set of information. Records are composed of fields, each of which contains one item of information. A set of records constitutes a file. For example, a personnel file might contain records that have three fields: a name field, an address field, and a phone number field. In relational database management systems, records are called tuples. (2) Some programming languages allow you to define a special data structure called a record. Generally, a record is a combination of other data objects. For example, a record might contain three integers, a floating-point number, and a character string.

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data structure data type database database management system field file