Question

This is general question about the best way I should setup a database, it is not specific to a software but for information it is MYSQL.

I am monitoring 1000 “houses” and how many people are present at that house at a given time to later be used in some statistics such as:

Which house is normally the fullest at a specific time range
Average capacity in general
Busiest time frame for all houses, and for a specific house.

I will be checking how many people are present every hour.

Whats the best way to setup this mysql table?

Answer 1

Looks like you would (optionally) want entries for each house (a house table to describe each location, with some sort of ID).

Then you would want a transactional table which would contain the house ID, the number of people and the sample date/time.

This way you can analyse what you need

e.g.

House
   HouseID int
   Address1 varchar
   etc etc..

Attendance
   RecordID int (optional I suppose)
   HouseID int
   People int
   SampleDate datetime

Queries for stuff like averages are easy enough

SELECT AVG(People) FROM Attendance WHERE HouseID = 1 AND SampleDate BETWEEN Date1 AND Date2

Which house is fullest for a specific time range

SELECT TOP 1 HouseID FROM Attendance GROUP BY HouseID ORDER BY SUM(People) DESC

Disclaimer: some/all of these queries might not work 🙂

Edit: They do work! Here’s a SQL fiddle showing them in action

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/293e4/8