What is the difference between Process Commander's concept of a work object and ordinary database records?

Use work objects in your applications wherever the concept of units of work is relevant. Pegasystems has made major investments building work object capabilities and they add a lot of value even if your application doesn't naturally appear to benefit from using flows.

By using work objects, users automatically create history information which is useful in understanding how a decision was made and to enables the use of reporting and analytics capabilities.

By default, databases treat most rows of a table as equal. Work objects have a life cycle - an initial period of change, followed in most cases by a longer period of no change, when the work is "done" or resolved. (Of course, because work objects are stored in a conventional relational database, the full power of searching, sorting, and reporting is available for both open and resolved work objects.)