Keys to Uniqueness: Candidate Keys in DBMS

Have you ever needed to find something specific in a big list? Maybe a particular student in a school register, a certain product in a massive inventory, or a unique transaction record? You need a way to point directly to that one thing without any confusion. Databases work the same way! To keep everything organized and easily searchable, each individual entry (we often call this a record or a row) needs something that makes it unique. This is where the concept of keys comes into play in database management systems (DBMS). Keys are special attributes or groups of attributes that help us identify records uniquely. One foundational concept is the candiadate key in dbms . Think of all the attributes you have for a record (like a person's name, address, phone number, ID). A candidate key is any single attribute, or a combination of attributes, that could potentially uniquely identify that record, and that doesn't contain any extra, unnecessary attributes. For example, a Socia...