A table is a natural and easily understood way of organizing data into columns and rows. Many computer applications use the table model to organize large amounts of data. For example, the relational database stores all of its data in a tabular format.

The table functions let you create tables and subset them in various ways. These functions are both powerful and easy to use. Tables, which you create with the BUILD_TABLE function, can be subsetted and manipulated with the QUERY_TABLE function. QUERY_TABLE, which closely resembles the Structured Query Language (SQL) SELECT command, is an easy-to-learn and conceptually natural way to access data in tables.