I see two scenarios, but not sure which is proper:

Scenario 1:

Table: Years
ID
Year

Table: Makes
ID
Make

Table: Models
ID
Model

Table: Series
ID
Series

Table: Vehicles
ID
YearID
MakeID
ModelID
SeriesID


Scenario 2:


Table: Years
ID
Year

Table: Makes
ID
YearID
Make

Table: Models
ID
YearID
MakeID
Model

Table: Vehicle
ID
YearID
MakeID
ModelID
Series

The goals is to have people narrow down their vehicle selection by starting with year, then make, the model then series. Thoughts?

well it's be a cracking start to make an effort at your coursework before posting here

What do you mean? I am not in school. I am just trying to learn on my own...

this always makes me plotz with laughter

do yourself a favour and stop applying ids to everything

Sigh...

Okay, like I said, I've just been trying to learn on my own. All I have are Internet tutorials and books telling me to assign unique ID's to everything. I'd love to learn the "proper" way, whichever that is, since what I keep reading doesn't seem to be it.

whatever you've been reading, it's wrong

one does ~not~ assign ids to everything willy-nilly

you should assign a surrogate key (for that's what it's called) only when a suitable natural key does not exist

suitable often means that the key can be used in other tables as a foreign key without becoming unwieldy

what's a natural key? any column, or combination of columns, that already exist within the data, that uniquely identify each row

more than this, i cannot tell you now, without turning this thread into a tutorial, which i'm not prepared to do

do some research on natural vs surrogate key -- it's a contentious issue, to be sure, but anyone who says you should apply a surrogate key to every table is deluded

Thank you. I have been reading SQL books for awhile and surprisingly its the first time I have heard of the two key types. I have heard primary and foreign but that's it. I will read more into it.

By the way, your book Simply SQL, is it written for beginners such as myself, or for more experienced SQL users?

definitely for beginners