What is the relationship between a 'record' and a 'file'?

Data storage in a computer system is organised in a hierarchy, moving from the smallest unit to the largest: a character, then a field (one piece of data, such as a surname), then a record, then a file, then a database.

A record is a complete set of related fields describing one entity, for example one student's name, admission number, and class all grouped together. A file is a collection of such records stored together, for example every student's record in a school kept in one student file. Because a file is made up of many individual records, the correct relationship is that a file contains multiple records, not the other way round.

Keeping this hierarchy in the right order prevents a common confusion: a record cannot contain files, since a record is the smaller unit that sits inside a file, not the other way round.