Q: The term attribute refers to a ___________ of a table.

Attribute is a specific domain in the relation which has entries of all tuples. In the context of relational databases, a column is a set of data values, all of a single type, in a table. Columns define the data in a table, while rows populate data into the table. Most databases allow columns to contain complex data like images, whole documents or even video clips. Therefore, a column allowing data values of a single type does not necessarily mean it only has simple text values. Some databases go even further and allow the data to be stored as a file on the operating system, while the column data only contains a pointer or link to the actual file. This is done for the purposes of keeping the overall database size manageable – a smaller database size means less time taken for backups and less time to search for data within the database.