(1) A collection of adjacent fields of data. Also called an "array," tables may permanently reside in a program or be in storage and read at runtime. Tables may remain static (unchanged) or be dynamically updated. For example, tables in a hard disk's or SSD's file system are continuously updated as data are written into the sectors (see
FAT and
MFT). See
table lookup,
decision table and
HTML table.
(2) A collection of records (a file) in a relational database. See
DBMS and
file.