Hello, I am new to this forum, and new also to databases (since relational database course in college long ago). I have mySQL set up and I'm OK with how to make a database and add tables, it's the structure that I'm not getting.

Here's what I'm trying to do:
I'm gathering sales data for several cities over time.

So right now for each city, I visualize this as a table, with the row names being the time periods, and the columns naming the pieces of data, such as units sold over the time period, average price, etc.

There would be one table for each city, I guess.

- I'm wanting to call various pieces of data for a single city into the relevant city page of my website.
- Later, I might want to query multiple tables and pull various numbers for all or several cities into different pieces of my site.

So I guess my question is: does this sound sensible? does it even sound relational (I don't necessarily think so)? do I need a mySQL database or should I just park this somewhere else?

Any suggestions or pointers to somewhere I can learn about best structure for something like this would be appreciated. To me, it seems like a bunch of stacked Excel sheets with a page for each city, but I'm an Excel person, so that's not surprising.

TIA!

a row per sales period, or even a row per sale, soemwhere within that an identifier which acts as a foreign key pointing to a table city

you wouldn't have a table per city.

everything you said makes very good sense, except for one thing, and that was the idea of separate tables -- use a single cities table instead

and it's perfectly okay to think of data as an excel sheet

Thanks, both of you. I will fuss with it a bit more and may be back with addtl ?s, but I think I understand the answers.