Tables are logical structures that DB2® maintains. DB2 supports several different types of tables.

Tables are made up of columns and rows. The rows of a relational table have no fixed order. The order of the columns, however, is always the order in which you specified them when you defined the table.

At the intersection of every column and row is a specific data item called a value. A column is a set of values of the same type. A row is a sequence of values such that the nth value is a value of the nth column of the table. Every table must have one or more columns, but the number of rows can be zero.

DB2 accesses data by referring to its content instead of to its location or organization in storage.

DB2 supports several different types of tables:

• Auxiliary tables
• Base tables
• Clone tables
• Materialized query tables
• Result tables
• Temporary tables
• XML tables