record

record

(1) Pronounced "reck-erd," a group of related fields that store data about a subject (master record) or activity (transaction record). A collection of records make up a file.

Master records contain permanent data, such as account number, and variable data, such as balance due. Transaction records contain only permanent data, such as quantity and product code. See master file and transaction file for examples of record contents.

(2) In certain disk organization methods, a record is a block of data read and written at one time without any relationship to records in a file.

(3) Pronounced "ruh-kord," to capture audio or video on a tape, disk or electronic recording device.

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record

1. a written account of some transaction that serves as legal evidence of the transaction

2. a written official report of the proceedings of a court of justice or legislative body, including the judgments given or enactments made

3. a list of crimes of which an accused person has previously been convicted, which are known to the police but may only be disclosed to a court in certain circumstances

4. have a record to be a known criminal; have a previous conviction or convictions

5. a thin disc of a plastic material upon which sound has been recorded. Each side has a spiral groove, which undulates in accordance with the frequency and amplitude of the sound. Records were formerly made from a shellac-based compound but were later made from vinyl plastics

6. Computing a group of data or piece of information preserved as a unit in machine-readable form

7. (in some computer languages) a data structure designed to allow the handling of groups of related pieces of information as though the group was a single entity

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(data, database, programming)

record - An ordered set of fields, usually stored contiguously. The term is used with similar meaning in several different contexts. In a file, a "record" probably has some fixed length, in contrast to a "line" which may have any length and is terminated by some End Of Line sequence). A database record is also called a "row". In a spreadsheet it is always called a "row". Some programming languages use the term to mean a type composed of fields of several other types (C calls this a "struct"). In all these cases, a record represents an entity with certain field values. Fields may be of a fixed width (bits or characters) or they may be separated by a delimiter character, often comma (CSV) or HT (TSV). In a database the list of values of a given field from all records is called a column.