Difference between "Entity" and "Record"?

Question

While studying for my IT exam I came across the following sentence:

"A collection of fields that store information about a certain entity, is a record. A record is a whole row of fields."

..but I have always thought that the correct term for an "object" in a database is an "entity".

So is the correct term an "entity" or a "record"? Or are they the same?

Answer 1

In that sentence, entity doesn't refer to anything in the database. It's using entity to refer to a conceptual object, whatever thing in the real world the database record represents. For instance, if you have an inventory database, each row stands for a product in the warehouse, and that's the entity.