Relational Databases and SQL Key Terms GCSE

Key terms

Attribute

An individual fact, detail or characteristic of an entity (also commonly called a field)

Database

A persistent store of related information

Entity

A thing, person, object or relationship about which data can be collected

Field

A single piece of information about an entity

Flat file database

A database containing a single table

Foreign key

A field in the table which contains the value of primary key in another table (since the primary key is unique this means that the foreign key identifies, or links to one record)

Primary key

A unique piece of information within a table to identify a record

Redundancy

The duplication of data within a database

Record

A collection of fields/attributes about the same thing, person, object or relationship in a table

Relational Database

A database with multiple linked tables

Table

A collection of related data