Data manipulation in a database

thatboyjim

Hi there

I am very new to PHP but have the task of writing an application to handle game stats for my american football website.

I basically want to hold stats for each player in a database. Then after a game, I want to have a form where I enter the relevant player's stats for that game, submit it and the application takes existing data from the website, adds the new stats to it and then re-uploads it.

Is this the long way around? Or should I just have each game for that person as a seperate record in the database then when i want to output the stats... just add them up 'on the fly' and output them.

Anyones suggestions would be really appreciated here.

Many thanks.

James

NogDog

I would opt for the second method: adding new records for each game. You can easily craft SQL queries to grab totals, averages, highs and lows via the various SQL grouping functions. It also provides a history for you should you need to verify the data entry, change the results for a given game, etc.

thatboyjim

Brilliant...

Next question (predictably) is do you know of where i can get information on how to do the sql data manipulation part? Im clueless.

Or even a quick example of how I might add some fields together would be really helpful as i will be able to use this as a structure to do the rest.

Thanks again.

James

NogDog

Suppose the column "points" was used to record a players' points scored in each game (each row in the table would be an instance of one player in one game). This example would be applicable in MySQL, the syntax may be different in another DBMS:

SELECT player_id, player_name, SUM(points) AS total_points FROM table_name 
GROUP BY player_id ORDER BY total_points DESC

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html for more info on MySQL grouping functions.

Sxooter

Look up insert and update in your database server's docs. I know both mysql and postgresql have a few examples in there on how to do it.

thatboyjim

Thanks for your help guys...

Still a bit clueless but will persist in looking the information up.

James

Sxooter

Do a google search for mysql tutorial and you should find a starting point.

Here's a generic sql tutorial from w3 schools:

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_select.asp

And, MySQL has a tutorial in the documentation:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/tutorial.html