Data is usually organized  as collection of Fields, Records and Files. What are these terms?

·         Field is defined as a unit of meaningful information about an entity like date of flight, name of passenger, address etc.

·         Record is a collection of units of information about a particular entity. Passenger of an airplane, an employee of an organization, or an article sold from a store.

·         File is a collection of records involving a set of entities with certain aspects in common and organized for some particular purpose is called a file. For example collection of records of all passengers.

With a database you can store, organize and retrieve a large collection of related information on computer. If you like, it is the electronic equivalent of an indexed filing cabinet. Let us look at some features and applications.

Information is entered on a database via fields. Each field holds a separate piece of information, and the fields are collected together into records. For example, a record about an employee might consist of several fields which give their name, address, telephone number, age, salary and length of employment with the company. 

Records are grouped together into files which hold large amounts of information. Files can easily be updated: you can always change fields, add new records or delete old ones. With the right database software, you are able to keep track of stock, sales, market trends, orders, invoices and many more details that can make your company successful.

Another feature of database programs is that you can automatically look up and find records containing particular information. You can also search on more than one field at a time. For example, if a managing director wanted to know all the customers that spend more than £7,000 per month, the program would search on the name field and the money field simultaneously. security devices, you can share part of your files on a network and control who sees the information.

 Most aspects of the program can be protected by user-defined passwords. For example, if you wanted to share an employee’s personal details, but not their commission, you could protect the salary field.