In general, an attribute is a characterisitc. In a database management system, an attribute refers to a database component, such a table. It may also refer to a database field. Attributes describe the instances in the row of a database.
Think of a table in a relational database as being analogous to a spreadsheet. An attribute is simply one non-null cell in the spreadsheet, or the conjunction of a column and a row. It stores only one piece of data about the object represented by the table in which the attribute belongs. For example, the attributes in an invoice might be price, number, date, paid/unpaid, etc.
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