Question

I’m building a MySQL database of vehicles. There are many different possible vehicle attributes that I want to be populated by a database, color, transmission, fuel, etc.

Would it make sense to create a table for each set of attributes or should I put them all in one table, then name each column what the attribute is. Then I’d just list the possible choices as rows.

Kinda new to database design and wanted to get some opinions. Thank you ahead of time!

Answer 1

The answer to your question depends on whether each vehicle can have more than one “color” or “fuel” attached to it.

If it was me, I would make the base tables look like this:

Table: Vehicles
– Cols: vehicleID, name, etc.

Table: Colors
– Cols: colorID, name, rgbValue

Table: Fuel
– Cols: fuelID, name, etc.

If each vehicle can only have one color and one fuel, then change the Vehicle table to be something like:

Table: Vehicles
– Cols: vehicleID, name, colorID, fuelID, etc.

If each vehicle could have 4 colors and 3 fuels, etc. Then leave the Vehicle table alone, and create “relationship” tables similar to these:

Table: vehicle_has_color
– Cols: vehicleID, colorID

Table: vehicle_has_fuel
– Cols: vehicleID, fuelID

Hopefully this gives you an idea of ideal database design, and gives you a good place to start from. Keep in mind that if you only have 3 different colors and they’re not going to change, it might be simpler for you just to insert the color name directly in the Vehicle table and handle the selecting of the color in the PHP or HTML code.