Member Avatar for teedoff

Just curious, and well hoping to save myself months of time..lol

I've seen databases online already set up to purchase. I know a little about databases...very little, and could probably wing my way through creating a database for car lighting applications for the last 100 years, but thought there might be a database out there similar to what I need that I could download.

Anyone know of a database like this? If not, I'd like some feedback on how to set up the initial structure of the tables. In particular, what is most confusing me is that a single make and model of a car can in fact be associated with many years. I could have a manufacture table, ie chevy, ford, dodge, then have a makes table...such as camaro, f-150, challenger, but then I was thinking about how I would relate the last 40 years or so the camaro has been made.

Thanks for any tips and help.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rch1231
Member Avatar for teedoff

Thanks that does help. At least this gives me a list of every make and trim option for each year. And if this one exists, I'm sure there are spreadsheets of earlier years as well.

Again, the thing I'm worried about is how to normalize this type of database. I know I need a table with just the manufactures names, but then I had a table for just the makes of each manufactures. But the years are confusing me. Maybe I'm making it too complicated and should just have a table with all available makes with trims AND years together? I was thinking though this would not inforce referential integrity, right?

Member Avatar for adam_k

I'm sorry to break this to you, but I'm not sure that excel is free.
You may have landed on the download page, but it says "Thank you for purchasing" so I searched their site and found this page: http://www.ecommercesiteowners.com/car-make-model-year-databases

You might want to verify that this file is something you can use.

Member Avatar for teedoff

hmm, well I already downloaded it..lol

Either way, it may only serve as a reference for how many makes of vehicles there are in the time period 1990 to 2005, which is what that file contained. It may not be suitable for a database structure.

Member Avatar for rch1231

Hello,

That is interesting I got 1990 to 2010 and 21338 rows of data. Well if it would help I created a database with three tables from the data that may help. Make, Make_model and Make_model_year which seemed more logical to me. I exported the MySQL database and zipped it and you can download a copy at this URL:

http://txlinux.com/carmodels.zip

txlinux.com is my domain and you should be able to click on the link and down load it. Unzipped it is just a text file from mysqldump for the database. If you create a database and add USE <database_name>; to the from of the text (where database_name is the name of the database you created ) then load/run it as a query it will recreate the database I built indexes and all.

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