Database for Tournament League

[drewdunne88]

Hey everyone

I have been trying for the last two days, to little avail, to convert my paper records into an access database. I have worked with database in the past for a small business, but something with so many relationships as this is causing me trouble.

What I am trying to do is have a series of tables that have linked data values so that I can keep track of player's statistics within a video game league.

The league is the GSL (Global Starcraft League) based out of South Korea. I have ~200 pages of handwritten notes on games that I want to input into a database.



So far, I have figured I need 2-3 Tables. And have sorted them like so:

Table 1 "Matches":

ID (key/autonumber)
Event (GSL May, GSL July, GSL August, GSL Super Tournament, etc.)
Player 1 (Name of Player 1)
Player 2 (Name of Player 2)
Winner
Notes (This is where I want to be able to have a lot of written data, like 2-3 paragraphs on the match)

Table 2 "Players":

Player (key/text)
Team (These players are nearly all members of a team)
Race (Zerg/Terran/Protoss)
Win %

Table 3 "Teams": honestly I think I can just use a query for this, but I wasn't sure.

Thanks ahead of time for any help you guys can give me. I am really hoping to get all these written notes into a format that I can easily find what I am looking for and also, most important, read notes by PLAYER so that I can start to learn these players better. That's really the problem here, so if you think there is an easier way to do it let me know?

Thanks!

-Andrew Dunne

[TheShabz]

This is a good start. I have a couple questions and recommendations though.

-Questions-
1. Does "Team" have any functional use in the database or is it merely an attribute of "Player"? Meaning, in a match, will you ever have Team Vs Team instead of Player Vs Player (This would affect your Player 1 and Player 2 fields)
2. Do you care about the tournament structure in the matches? The way you have it set up, there is no way to determine who finished where in a tourney or event.

-Recommendations-
1. I would not use a Player name as the key. You could have two people with the same name and it would throw things off.
2. I would not use the names of players 1, 2, and winner, but their ID that you will create (a simple autonumber field will suffice)
3. Notes should be a "memo" datatype to fill in all the info you want. However, I'm not sure how well you'll be able to format it into paragraphs.
4. I would create separate tables for Event (GSL May, GSL July, etc) as well as Race. Read up on table relationships and normalization for a better grasp of why. your Team table would be similar to the Event and Race tables as far as purpose, assuming it doesn't have some actual function.

I think you have a good main grasp, just some structure and foresight things to look at before you build the db.