Question

I’d like to hear some advice on designing the tables in this database…

Let’s say I have 3 tables: Shirts, Pants and Shoes

They all have the same fields: Name, Description, Manufacture, Material and ID
I can’t simply put the IDs as 1, 2, 3, 4 for each of them so I’ve decided to a notation: shirt001, shirt002, pants001, pants002, pants003 and so forth. I know this isn’t the correct way to design it so should I just combine it into one big table and have the fields as Name, Description, Manufacture, Material, ID with an extra ‘Type’ field?

Answer 1

Yes, you should make one database table that defines all of the different products:

Table:   Product 
Columns: ID (pk, identity),
         ProductTypeID (fk to ProductType table),
         Name,
         Description, 
         Manufacture,
         Material

Table:   ProductType
Columns: ID (pk, identity),
         Name,
         Description