CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sql-server
Sea_Ocean
Sea_Ocean

Reputation: 319

I still don't understand the exact meanings of fields/records and columns/rows in T-SQL

According to the book I have:

Fields and records are physical. Fields are what you have in user interfaces in client applications, and records are what you have in files and cursors. Tables are logical, and they have logical rows and columns.

I honestly have no idea what the author is talking about. Can someone kindly explain to me in layman terms what the differences are. Please no geeky/nerdy explanations. Just something that a newbie can understand. Thank you so much.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 47

Answers (2)

CurseStacker
CurseStacker

Reputation: 1079

Fields / Columns represents what kind of data will be stored

while

Records / Rows represents the actual data stored.

The table is the collection of columns / fields that holds your data.

Example table named person


Person

Name    Age
John     30
Peter    29
Michael  25

Name and age are what fields / columns are, while john, peter, michael and ages are what records / rows are.

Upvotes: 1

modal_dialog
modal_dialog

Reputation: 743

I've been doing SQL for 20+ years and to be honest, I don't think you need to worry about fields and records. Everything in SQL is oriented around rows and columns. If you've ever looked at a spreadsheet that should be pretty intuitive.

In SQL you have actual physical tables that define real rows and columns.

Then you create SELECT queries on those tables to get data out. You can think of every SELECT query as creating a "logical" table for your results where you can JOIN column values from different rows in different tables. The join uses something the rows have in common, like perhaps they both have a column with the same value.

So you may have 2 physical tables:

Table: User
UserID    Name
------    ----
1         John Smith

Table: UserAddress
UserID    Address
------    -------
1         123 Main St.

And you might do a query like this:

SELECT
    User.UserID, User.Name, UserAddress.Address
FROM
    User
INNER JOIN
    UserAddress
ON
    User.UserID = UserAddress.UserID

You can think of the result as a logical table containing three columns: UserID, Name and Address.

If your book is calling these Fields and Records don't worry about it. It's the same thing. Every API I've seen treats the result set you get back as rows and columns anyway. For example ADO.NET Has a result called a DataTable which as a properties called Rows and Columns.

Upvotes: 4

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