Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) GCSE Computer Science Paper 2 Practice

In a database context, a record typically refers to a collection of related fields that represent a single entity or item, such as a person or a product. Each field within that record can contain different types of data, which means that various data values can have different data types.

For example, in an employee record, you may have fields for the employee's name (which is a string), age (which is an integer), salary (which is a floating-point number), and employment start date (which is a date type). Each of these fields holds a specific type of data value that aligns with the nature of the information being stored.

Understanding this concept is crucial because it allows for more organized and structured data storage, thus enabling easier data manipulation and retrieval based on the different types involved. The other terms, such as data fields, data tables, and data sets, typically refer to either the components of a record or larger collections of data, rather than the specific types of the values contained within those records.