SQL Tutorial >> What is Database Table?

SQL Tutorial will teach us that database table is a container that holds information like items. For example, an Employees table would contain the same basic details on each employee like employee name, job title, employee department and so on. Each record, each chunk of information you need to store lives in a field. When you view a single employee record, database will display it. Whenever you want to view more that one record at a time, you do so in a table report, where fields appear as columns and each record is a row.

The foundation of every Relational Database Management System is a database object called table. Every database consists of one or more then one table, which store the database’s data or information or records. Each table has its own unique name and consists of columns and rows.

The database table columns are also called table fields, and they have their own unique names and have a pre-defined data types. Table columns can have various attributes defining the column functionality (the column is a primary key, there is an index defined on the column, the column has certain default value, etc.).

While table columns describe the data types, the table rows contain the actual data for the columns.

Here is an example of a simple database table, containing Employees data. The first row, listed in bold, contains the names of the table columns:

Table: Employees

 

FirstName	LastName	Email	DOB	Phone
Austin	Hennery	austin.it@gamail.com	24/11/1978	446 102-2222
Creston	Narvon	narvon_crest@hotmail.com	22/04/1976	443 325-4545
Kate	Bladen	kbladen@usa.net	01/05/1980	326 503-3232
Angela	Julie	julieee@yahoo.co.uk	11/12/1977	326 323-8888
Bobbi	Ferguson	bobi123@kiwibox.com	10/02/1970	506 252-9875
Cute	Alfa	cafa@gmail.com	19/05/1972	506 272-4566

 

 

Now that we’ve learned what is a database table, we can continue with our sql tutorial and learn how to create tables in a database and use it for storage of data.