Question

If I have a match table ( id , details) and team table (id,name) and I want to get all matches played by a given two teams.

My solution is:

Create a third table contains on (match_id,team1_id,team2_id)

Is this the best practice in this case ?

Answer 1

Assuming a match can be played only by two tables, the team1_id and team2_id should be part of the match table itself as attributes. A separate table is not needed. You can also define FOREIGN KEY relationship between team1_id and team table’s id and the same for team2_id also.

A third table would be needed for a match that can be played by multiple teams and in such case the table structure would be (match_id, team_id) where there will multiple records with same match_id, i.e. one-to-many relationship between match table and match_teams table.