drill-down: can I do this without reinventing wheel?

I am going to try again with a more concrete question.

Much of my site will involve drill-down scenarios, from pre-populated MySQL tables, like the following. There is a db table of "sections" of a university course. There is another table of "students". The two tables are linked by a third table of "section assignments".

I want a "sections page" to display a list of all the sections, each with an instructor's name (drawn from yet another table), and each with a link to another page. The page linked to will be the "students" page. The "students" page will link to a list of the students in that section.

I know how to do this in PHP -- send a query, display the results in a table, etc. But this is such a common "drill down" problem, I know Drupal must have a way of doing it. Somehow I'm not getting it.

My thanks for any help you can give me. My apologies for being so slow at this.