An Enterprise Database Server data set (or data file or relation) can be represented as a table with labeled columns. The column names are the data item names, and each row of the table is a member or record of the data set (or a record of the data file or a tuple of the relation). For example, employees can be described as having a name (consisting of 12 alpha characters), an age (consisting of a 2-digit number), and an employee number (consisting of a 5-digit number). The information about a particular group of employees can be represented as follows:

The structure of this database could be represented in the DASDL description as follows. In the DASDL description, the employee number is represented by the identifier EMPNUM.

EMPLOYEES DATA SET
 (
  NAME      ALPHA(12);
  AGE       NUMBER(2);
  EMPNUM    NUMBER(5);
 );

The DASDL description of a database is independent of its data content. The preceding table has three lines, and the corresponding Enterprise Database Server database would have three records stored in the EMPLOYEES data set.