record (redirected from track 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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(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.