What is the fundamental structure of a relational database system?

The fundamental structure of a relational database system is centered around tables. Tables are composed of rows and columns, where each row represents a unique record, and each column represents a specific attribute or field of the data. This tabular format allows for efficient organization, retrieval, and manipulation of the data.

In a relational database, the use of tables facilitates the establishment of relationships between different data sets through the use of primary and foreign keys. This structure is designed to minimize redundancy and maintain data integrity, enabling complex queries and analytics to be performed easily across related datasets.

While records, files, and indexes contribute to the overall functionality and organization of a database, they are not the foundational elements that define a relational database system. Records refer to individual entries within a table, files can denote collections of data or entire databases, and indexes are optimizations that improve the speed of data retrieval but do not represent the structure of the database itself in the same fundamental way that tables do.