A database is composed of smaller units called records. In a text database, a record can be an entire document, a section within a document, a single page, or a fragment of text within a page. When you search a database, you will retrieve one or more records containing information that satisfies your query.
A record can contain smaller regions of data called fields. A field usually defines a particular type of data common to several or all records within a database. For instance, in a database of corporate memos, wherein each memo makes up a record, the following fields might be used: TO, FROM, DATE, SUBJECT, and TEXT. You can narrow the scope of a search by restricting it to one or more fields. In this example, you might limit your search to the FROM field when searching for a sender's name. Only those records with the specified name in that field would be retrieved.
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