A candidate key is a combination of attributes that can be uniquely used to identify a database record without any extraneous data. Each table may have one or more candidate keys. One of these candidate keys is selected as the table primary key.

A candidate key is one that can identify each row of a
table uniquely. Generally a candidate key becomes the
primary key of the table. If the table has more than one
candidate key, one of them will become the primary key, and
the rest are called alternate keys.

A key formed by combining at least two or more columns is
called composite key.

A table may have more than one combination of columns that could uniquely identify the rows in a table; each combination is a candidate key. During database design you can pick up one of the candidate keys to be the primary key. For example, in the supplier table supplierid and suppliername can be candidate key but you will only pick up supplierid as the primary key.