I have a system where (to start) I have three types of data I need to store. I'm familiar with relational databases so I'm going to describe it in those terms. The Author table just has a couple columns like a primary key, and a few text fields (it's info about an author). Location has a similar structure to Author, but it's for different data (info about locations). Article is basically what links the two together. It has some regular text data, but also has foreign keys to both Author and Location (it's an Article written by Author about Location).
I've played with two ideas for how to represent this in Drupal. First with the Field API creating content types. The main problem here is that I'm not sure how to set it up so that Article has the proper relations to Author and Location.
The second approach I'm considering is using the Entity API module, but I'm not really very familiar with the module. However, I am very comfortable using hook_schema() to set up the tables and relationships. From there, I'm not sure if Entity API has much useful in the way of making the data manageable like a content type or if I'd have to write that all by hand to begin with.
Am I looking at this all wrong? What is the drupal way?