Question

Sorry if the title is not clear. I am a bit confused about how to plan my database schema as given my database design skill level the requirement falls under kind of advanced 🙂 I could really use some help here. Anyway, here it goes …

I need to track match details for teams. For the sake of simplicity, lets say I need to track the match date, result and the teams that played the match. Now, how do I design my tables so I can make sure all relevant data is returned without having to keep multiple records of the same match. I am not sure if I am explaining clearly, so here’s an example below.

match_id    team1             team2    result
________    ________    ________     ________
1           Arsenal          Chelsea    5-3
2           Manchester Utd   Arsenal    1-0
3           Liverpool        Newcastle  2-0
4           Arsenal          Everton    1-0

From this data, if I search for match_ids for matches played by Arsenal, I should get the below results,
1,2,4.

Now, in the basic designs which I know of, I would normally search for matched in team name for the team name supplied and return the result. But here the team name can be in two different columns and both can be relevant. So, is it something I need to decide on the design level or something that can be done with some sort of query.

(Note: Storing teams as home/away is not an option for my requirement).

Answer 1

You can just query both columns, it’s not a problem:

select match_id
from matches
where team1 = 'Arsenal' or team2 = 'Arsenal';

(You could also normalize this schema by placing teams in their separate table and leaving only their ids in the matches table, but that doesn’t change much, you still have to query both columns. Read about database normalization, any SQL book covers this).