: Re: How can I consistently distinguish among tables, fields, and records in a database? I am describing a database for a scientific publication. The database has many tables, and each table has fields

@Berumen699

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My first question, as always in my writing specialty, is who is your audience? It makes a great deal of difference to know the expected sophistication of the audience and their experience with databases.

The "trees" table is related to "apples" table so that each "tree" (record in the "trees" table) can have zero or more records in the apples table, but each individual apple (a record in the apples table) comes from only one tree. An apple record includes a color field, and apples can be either "red", "green", or NULL.

For example, a person with database experience would know what a relational database is and you would only have to describe "tree" as the primary key for the database, located in the Tree table. The Apple table would have a foreign key of "tree" and the color field is often also called an attribute.

If you have a person with NO database knowledge, you have a different problem and you have to ask yourself if you need to describe the database and tables and such or you merely need to describe the relationships and not overload them with talk of tables, rows, etc.

My typical experience with databases, especially complicated ones, is that trying to describe them in paragraph form is painful and I tend to move toward a schema description via document tables and/or a entity-relationship diagram. These are better understood than trying to invent a convention of bold, italic, etc. The diagrams also make the relationships far easier to understand and allow the readers a way to trace relationships without having to (re)-decipher a written explanation.

here's a Wikipedia page on entity-relationship modeling that's a reasonable reference entity-relationship model If you have truly huge databases or very very complex ones, these are typically broken down into subsets according to functionality or objects.

I have seen a quick format used of something like:

Table: Tree
- TreeName (primary key, string)

Table: Apple
- TreeName (foreign key, Tree:TreeName)
- Color (string)

I'm not convinced this helps a lot but it might be a middle-of-the-road solution.

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