z/OS® manages data by means of data sets. The term data set refers to a file that contains one or more records. The record is the basic unit of information used by a program running on z/OS.

Any named group of records is called a data set. Data sets can hold information such as medical records or insurance records, to be used by a program running on the system. Data sets are also used to store information needed by applications or the operating system itself, such as source programs, macro libraries, or system variables or parameters. For data sets that contain readable text, you can print them or display them on a console (many data sets contain load modules or other binary data that is not really printable). Data sets can be cataloged, which permits the data set to be referred to by name without specifying where it is stored.

In simplest terms, a record is a fixed number of bytes containing data. Often, a record collects related information that is treated as a unit, such as one item in a database or personnel data about one member of a department. The term field refers to a specific portion of a record used for a particular category of data, such as an employee's name or department.

The records in a data set can be organized in various ways, depending on how we plan to access the information. If you write an application program that processes things like personnel data, for example, your program can define a record format for each person's data.