CODEWITHSUNDEEP
databaseentityrecord
charlos
charlos

Reputation: 43

Difference between "Entity" and "Record"?

While studying for my IT exam I came across the following sentence:

"A collection of fields that store information about a certain entity, is a record. A record is a whole row of fields."

..but I have always thought that the correct term for an "object" in a database is an "entity".

So is the correct term an "entity" or a "record"? Or are they the same?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 9502

Answers (3)

Dom Turnbull
Dom Turnbull

Reputation: 1

I would say that an entity concept is physicalised by 1 or more tables e.g.

  1. a product concept might be encapsulated entirely in 1 table
  2. a person concept might be spread across several tables, for example due to normalisation - all information relating to a person might not exist in the same table.

Upvotes: 0

Soerendip
Soerendip

Reputation: 9138

An entity is defined as “something that exists as a particular and discrete unit.” In terms of identity management, an entity is the logical relationship between two or more records. [...] An entity is also called a “linkage set.” There can be an unlimited number of records in an entity or linkage set. Source

Along these lines, an entity can be a set of records in a table or even across different tables.

Upvotes: 0

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 780655

In that sentence, entity doesn't refer to anything in the database. It's using entity to refer to a conceptual object, whatever thing in the real world the database record represents. For instance, if you have an inventory database, each row stands for a product in the warehouse, and that's the entity.

Upvotes: 8

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