What is a record?

A record, sometimes called a structure or compound data is a collection of related items – often of different data types – called fields. A record is like an object with attributes, although records do not require the object-oriented paradigm and do not have methods. Records are often thought of as special cases of objects, referred to as plain old data structures or PODs.

It is useful to define a fixed maximum size of each field in bytes when using string fields in records in order to minimise data storage requirements and speed up searches.