What are Entities and Attributes in a database?

Entities and Attributes: The real world which is being attempted to market on to the database would consist of occasionally a tangible object such as an employee, a component in an inventory or a space or it may be intangible such as an event, a job description, identification numbers or an abstract construct. All such items about which relevant information is stored in the database are called Entities. The qualities of the entity which we store as information are called the attributes. An attribute may be expressed as a numb or as a text. It may even be a scanned picture, a sound sequence, a moving picture which is now possible in some visual and multi-media databases.

Data processing normally concerns itself with a collection of similar entities and records information about the same attributes of each of them. 1h the traditional approach, a programmer usually maintains a record about each entity and a data item in each record relates to each attribute. Similar records are grouped into files and such a 2-dimensional array is sometimes referred to as a flat file.