What’s the Difference between a Column and a Field ?

 

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Field and columns :

A field contains a single attribute, or property, of any object,
such as description, price, cost, quantity, etc, stored in a row, or record,
or a person's name, adress, city, state and zip code.

 

A “column” is the collection of all of the individual fields in each row in the table.
In other words, all of the “LastName” fields in the table form the “LastName  column.

 

Click for examples of fields and columns

 

The subtle difference between the meaning of a “field” and a “column”
can be seen in the following illustration :

 

What’s in a name ?

 

Field and column names :


The field name is the name used to store the attribute in each field.

 

The column name is usually the name of the field,
but can be changed (“aliased”) to be more informative to the user,
because field names can sometimes be kind of cryptic.

 

Click here to see examples

 

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