Advice on design relations between tables

Question

I have information about music albums that I want to organise in RDBMS tables with relations between them. I have the following info for each album: artist, album name, year

Answer 1

The bottom line is that you need foreign keys. Your tables currently have a distinct id for each table named id:

artist.id
artist.name
album.id
album.album
album.year
album.label
album.rating
genre.id
genre.name
genre.id
genre.name

Key word is "relational" here. You need to relate the tables. Perhaps you'd design this by naming your ids better:

artist.artist_id
album.album_id
genre.genre_id

Then in the album table, you will add columns for artist_id and genre_id so you can join them back to the artist and genre tables

Without FKs, you will have a Cartesian product. Simple as that.