Question

I’m looking for a better way to do the following query. I have a table that looks like this:

game_id | home_team_id | away_team_id 1       | 100          | 200 2       | 200          | 300 3       | 200          | 400 4       | 300          | 100 5       | 100          | 400 

And I want to write a query that counts the number of home games and away games for each team and outputs the following:

team_id | home_games | away_games 100     | 2          | 1 200     | 2          | 1 300     | 1          | 1 400     | 0          | 2 

Right now, I wrote this monstrosity that works, but it’s slow (I know it’s pulling the entire 2,800 row from the table twice).

SELECT    home_team_id as team_id,   (SELECT count(*) FROM `game` WHERE home_team_id = temp_game.home_team_id) as home_games,   (SELECT count(*) FROM `game` WHERE home_team_id = temp_game.away_team_id) as away_games   FROM (SELECT * FROM `game`) as temp_game   GROUP BY home_team_id 

Can a SQL guru help me knock out a better way? I think my problem is that I don’t understand how to get a distinct list of the team IDs to throw at the count queries. I bet there’s a better way with a better placed, nested SELECT. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It’s cleaner if you have another table team with team_id and team_name.

 SELECT team_id, team_name,       sum(team_id = home_team_id) as home_games,       sum(team_id = away_team_id) as away_games  FROM game, team  GROUP BY team_id 

What’s going on: the no WHERE clause causes a Cartesian Product between the two tables; we group by team_id to get back to one row per team. Now there are all the rows from the game table for each team_id so you need to count them but the SQL count function isn’t quite right (it would count all the rows or all the distinct rows). So we say team_id = home_team_id which resolves to 1 or 0 and we use sum to add up the 1’s.

The team_name is just because it’s geeky to say that ‘team 200 had 20 home games’ when we ought to say that ‘Mud City Stranglers had 20 home games’.

PS. this will work even if there are no games (often a problem in SQL where there is a team with 0 games and that row will not show up because the join fails).