Managing basic statistics

niall_harkiss

I am currently trying to put together a website which catalogues (without regularity) the statistics of a football club, and its players, historically.

I plan to have a database of individual match results, including attendances, the players involved in the match etc...

I also plan to record the appearances, goals etc of the players involved in a seperate database, detailing each players' career. I would like to include players pictures, for instance also.

Ultimately, I want something dynamic enough to update globally without having to amend links etc in each page every time I add just one player, or just one month's worth of results.

What type of database should I be using and is there a script out there that anyone could recommend. I'll admit now I am by no means a PHP or web expert, but this site was recommended to me for advice.

Thanks in advance,

Niall

Sxooter

Any decent database will do. What you wanna do is focus on how to transform your raw data into the output you want for the site. most likely, you'll need to process the raw data every so often to summarize it, because statistical analysis can take a long time and gets worse as your dataset grows.

If you've never taken a course on statistics, you'd do well to take one now, or at least read a few books on it.

Me personally, I'd use PostgreSQL with the pl/R language underneath it to do what you're talking about. R is the open source implementation of S (i.e. SAS) a powerful statistics language. But you can do it in MySQL if that's what you've got. You'll just have to do a lot of stuff by hand and in php code that could be pushed down into the database with pgsql / pl/R.

And this being your first stats project, don't be afraid to build one to throw away.

tomhath

I think pl/R would be way more than you need for keeping team stats (unless you like doing regressions and stuff like that).

I expected a quick search would turn up several examples to get you started, but there doesn't seem to be much out there. Odd, because this is a popular project judging by the number of questions here.

Work through a couple of tutorials about building web sites that use php and databases, then try something simple like the roster. You'll catch on pretty quick.