beginner help

I am sorry to ask such a basic question but I have simple object with a couple properties and I would like to encode this in HDF5 format. Suppose object X with properties a,b, and c. I will encode in the HDF5 file several instances of this object. Like several records in a database.

So, is the object a group in HDF5 and are the properties the attributes? How does the dataset fit it in?

Again sorry for the probably obvious questions but I am not a computer scientist but I would very much like to take advantage of the file format.

Thanks,
David