I was reading the Nature of Geographic Information, and while this is obvious when you think about, I never thought of it in this way as somebody without any real formal education in database programming. Page 13.

Often, data files are tabular in form, composed of rows and columns. Rows, also known as records, correspond with individual entities, such as customer accounts. Columns correspond with the various attributes associated with each entity. The attributes stored in the accounts database of a telecommunications company, for example, might include customer names, telephone numbers, addresses, current charges for local calls, long distance calls, taxes, etc.