in a school management system, we need to incorporate 3 semester grades for each subject by each student.
after a discussion, i came up with two solutions.
solution 1
create 3 tables for each semester. (gradeSemester1, gradeSemester2, gradeSemester3)
solution 2
create 1 table called, semesterGrades and with a type handle all 3 semesters.
the reason for solution 1 is to stop data duplication. for example, if there is 8 subjects for a student. this can only contain 8 records in a table where as in solution 2 it can contain up to 24 records of a single student.
what will be the best solution when performance is a major concern ? why solution 2 is better ?
You don't want to change the Database structure depending on the data, so creating a new table whenever you need a new semester is bad design.
All you need is one extra table to store the grades. However I would personally not store them in columns, but in rows to be more flexible (maybe some day you want more than the grades of only 3 semesters).
The table would look like this:
ID | StudentID | SemesterID | SubjectID | Grade
Another advantage of this approach is that you know which semester a grade belongs to. If you have 3 columns for the grades, you only know the grades but you have no information about the semester (I'm guessing he could take more than 3 semesters if needed).
Also I would not worry about performance with this approach. You will have to join tables together but with the proper indexes set up that should not be an issue.
Joining tables is way more costly than a single select because in a join you're selecting and THEN pairing to create a single huge table.
Why not Solution 3:
Create 1 table with 3 columns (one for each semester). That's effectively what your join will be doing each time anyway. Is there any reason to keep them separate?
EDIT (explanation):
Unless I'm misunderstanding something...
A single row in this table would relate a student to a subject and could contain three columns (one for each semester grade). Assuming you have a table for students AND another table for subjects. Containing three semester grades in this table would still be normalized.
TABLE
----------------------
student_id
subject_id
semester1grade
semester2grade
semester3grade
Related
I need to summary columns together on each row, like a leaderboard. How it looks:
Name | country | track 1 | track 2 | track 3 | Total
John ENG 32 56 24
Peter POL 45 43 35
Two issues here, I could use the
update 'table' set Total = track 1 + track 2 + track 3
BUT it's not always 3 tracks, anywhere from 3 to 20.
Secound if I don't SUM it in mysql I can not sort it when I present data in HTML/php.
Or is there some other smart way to build leaderboards?
You need to redesign your table to have colums for name, country, track number and data Then instead if having a wide table with just 3 track numbers you have a tall, thin table with each row being the data for a given name, country and track.
Then you can summarise using something like
SELECT
country,
name,
sum(data) as total
FROM trackdata
GROUP BY
name,
country
ORDER BY
sum(data) desc
Take a look here where I have made a SQL fiddle showing this working the way you want it
Depending upon your expected data however you might really be better having a separate table for Country, where each country name only appears once (and also for name maybe). For example, if John is always associated with ENG then you have a repeating group and its better to remove that association from the table above which is really about scores on a track not who is in what country and put that into its own table which is then joined to the track data.
A full solution might have the following tables
**Athlete**
athlete_id
athlete_name
(other data about athletes)
**Country**
country_id
country_name
(other data about countries)
**Track**
Track_id
Track_number
(other data about tracks)
**country_athlete** (this joining table allows for the one to many of one country having many athletes
country_athlete_id
country_id
athlete_id
**Times**
country_athlete_id <--- this identifies a given combination of athlete and country
track_id <--- this identifies the track
data <--- this is where you store the actual time
It can get more complex depending on your data, eg can the same track number appear in different countries? if so then you need another joining table to join one track number to many countries.
Alternatively, even with the poor design of my SQL fiddle example, it might be good to make name,country and track a primary key so that you can only ever have one 'data' value for a given combination of name, country and track. However, this decision, and that of normalising your table into multiple joined tables would be based upon the data you expect to get.
But either way as soon as you say 'I don't know how many tracks there will be' then you should start thinking 'each track's data appears in one ROW and not one COLUMN'.
Like others mentioned, you need to redesign your database. You need an One-To-Many relationship between your Leaderboard table and a new Tracks table. This means that one User can have many Tracks, with each track being represented by a record in the Tracks table.
These two databases should be connected by a foreign key, in this case it could be a user_id field.
The total field in the leaderboard table could be updated every time a new track is inserted or updated, or you could have a query similar to the one you wanted. Here is how such a query could look like:
UPDATE leaderboard SET total = (
SELECT SUM(track) FROM tracks WHERE user_id = leaderboard.user_id
)
I recommend you read about database relationships, here is a link:
https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/sql-for-beginners-part-3-database-relationships--net-8561
I still get a lot of issues with this... I don't think that the issue is the database though, I think it's more they way I pressent the date on the web.
I'm able to get all the data etc. The only thing is my is not filling up the right way.
What I do now is like: "SELECT * FROM `times` NATURAL JOIN `players`
Then <?php foreach... ?>
<tr>
<td> <?php echo $row[playerID];?> </td>
<td> <?php echo $row[Time];?> </td>
....
The thing is it's hard to get sorting, order and SUM all in ones with this static table solution.
I searched around for leaderboards and I really don't understand how they build theres with active order etc. like. https://www.pgatour.com/leaderboard.html
How do they build leaderboards like that? With sorting and everything.
I am quite new to PHP and MySQL, but have experience of VBA and C++. In short, I am trying to count the occurrences of a value (text string), which can appear in 11 columns in my table.
I think I will need to populate a single-dimensional array from this table, but the table has 14 columns (named 'player1' to 'player14'). I want each of these 'players' to be entered into the one-dimensional array (if not NULL), before proceeding to the next row.
I know there is the SELECT DISTINCT statement in MySQL, but can I use this to count distinct occurrences across 14 columns?
For background, I am building a football results database, where player1 to player14 are the starting 11 (and 3 subs), and my PHP code will count the number of times a player has made an appearance.
Thanks for all your help!
Matt.
Rethink your database schema. Try this:
Table players:
player_id
name
Table games:
game_id
Table appearances:
appearance_id
player_id
game_id
This reduces the amount of duplicate data. Read up on normalization. It allows you to do a simple select count(*) from appearances inner join players on player_id where name='Joe Schmoe'
First of all, the database schema you're using is terrible, and you just found out a reason why.
That being said, I see no other way then to first get a list of all players by distinctly selecting the names of players into an array. Before each insertion, you would have to check if the name is already in the array (if it is already in, don't add it again).
Then, when you have the list of names, you would have to run an SQL statement for each player, adding up the number of occurences, like so:
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM <Table>
WHERE player1=? OR player2=? OR player3=? OR ... OR player14 = ?
That is all pretty complicated, and as I said, you should really change your database schema.
This sounds like a job for fetch_assoc (http://php.net/manual/de/mysqli-result.fetch-assoc.php).
If you use mysqli, you would get each row as an associative array.
On the other hand the table design seems a bit flawed, as suggested before.
If you had on table team with team name and what not and one table player with player names.
TEAM
| id | name | founded | foo |
PLAYER
| id | team_id | name | bar |
With that structure you could add 14 players, which point at the same team and by joining the two tables, extract the players that match your search.
I have a DB with several tables that contain basic, static ID-to-name data. 2 Columns only in each of these reference tables.
I then have another table that will be receiving data input by users. Each instance of user input will have it's own row with a timestamp, but the important columns here will contain either one, or several of the ID's related to names in one of the other tables. For the ease of submitting and retrieving this information I opted to input it as text, in json format.
Everything was going great until I realized I'm going to need to Join the big table with the little tables to reference the names to the ID's. I need to return the IDs in the results as well.
An example of what a few rows in this table might look like:
Column 1 | Column 2 | Timestamp
["715835199","91158582","90516801"] | ["11987","11987","22474"] | 2012-08-28 21:18:48
["715835199"] | ["0"] | 2012-08-28 21:22:48
["91158582","90516801"] | ["11987"] | 2012-08-28 21:25:48
There WILL be repeats of the ID#'s input in this table, but not necessarily in the same groupings, hence why I put the ID to name pairings in a separate table.
Is it possible to do a WHERE name='any-of-these-json-values'? Am I best off doing a ghetto join in php after I query the main table to pull the IDs for the names I need to include? Or do I just need to redo the design of the data input table entirely?
First of all:
Never, ever put more than one information into one field, if you want to access them seperately. Never.
That said, I think you will need to create a full N:M relation, which includes a join table: One row in your example table will need to be replaced by 1-N rows in the join table.
A tricky join with string matching will perform acceptably only for a very small number of rows, and the WHERE name='any-of-these-json-values' is impossible in your construct: MySQL doesn't "understand", that this is a JSON array - it sees it as unstructured text. On a join table, this clause comes quite naturally as WHERE somecolumn IN (1234,5678,8012)
Edit
Assuming your Column 1 contains arrays of IDs in table1 and Column 2 carries arrays of IDs in table2 you would have to do something like
CREATE TABLE t1t2join (
t1id INT NOT NULL ,
t2id INT NOT NULL ,
`Timestamp` DATETIME NOT NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (t1id,t2id,`Timestamp`) ,
KEY (t2id)
)
(you might want to sanity-check the keys)
And on an insert do the following (in pseudo-code)
Remember timestamp
Cycle all permutations of (Column1,Column2) given by user
Create row
So for your third example row, the SQL would be:
SELECT #now:=NOW();
INSERT INTO t1t2join VALUES
(91158582,11987,#now),
(90516801,11987,#now);
Apologies if this is really stupid but I don't have any experience in php and mysql to know how things should be done. I have a customer table in a mysql db and a group table:
customers - ID name email phone group
groups - ID name description
So I need to assign groups to customers if necessary, this can be more than one group to each customer. So e.g. customer 1 is in group 4,5,6
What way should I assign groups in the group column of the customer table. Should I just add the group ID's separated by commas, then just use explode when I need to get the individual ID's out?
Maybe this isn't the right approach at all, could someone enlighten me please. I would appreciate knowing the right way to do this, thanks.
Do not store multiple IDs in one column. This is a denormalization that will make it much harder to query and change your data, as well as hurting performance.
Instead, create a separate CustomerGroup table (with CustomerID and GroupID columns), and have one row per Customer/Group relationship.
Here is an example of tables to show how you should implement this :
Table 1 CONSUMERS:
id name email
1 john john#something.com
2 ray ray#something.com
Table 2 GROUPS :
id group_name description
1 music good music group
2 programming programmers
Table 3 CONSUMERS_GROUPS
consumer_id group_id
1 1
1 2
2 1
Now the table 3 is listing consumers ids which belong to which group id.
This type of relationship is called one to many relation where, one consumer can have many groups. Reverse might also be true where one group can have many consumers. In that case relationship is called many to many
Should I just add the group ID's separated by commas, then just use explode when I need to get the individual ID's out?
No! If you do that then you won't quickly be able to (for example) query for which users there are in a specific group.
Instead use a join table with two columns, each of which has a foriegn key constraint to the corresponding table.
group_id customer_id
4 1
5 1
6 1
I have 3 employers IDs: 1, 2 and 3. I am generating tasks for each one by adding a line in database and in column "for_emp" I insert IDs I want to assign this task for and could be all 3 of them separated by comma. So let's say I got a task and "for_emp" is "1,2,3", the employers IDs. If I would like to select all tasks for the ID 2, will I be able to select from the row that has "1,2,3" as IDs and just match "2" there ? If not, how do you suggest I insert my emp IDs into one row in database ? The db is MySQL.
Any ideas ? Thanks.
Don't do it like that, you should normalize your database.
What you want to do is have a table such as task, and then task_assignee. task_assignee would have fields task_id and user_id. If a task has eg. three assignees (IDs 1, 2 and 3), then you'll create three rows in the task_assignee table for that one task, like this:
+--------+---------+
|task_id | user_id |
+--------+---------+
| 1 | 1 [
| 1 | 2 [
| 1 | 3 [
+--------+---------+
Then it's just a simple matter of querying the task_assignee table to find all tasks that are assigned to a given user.
Here's an example of how to get all the tasks for user_id 2:
SELECT t.* FROM task AS t INNER JOIN task_assignee AS ta WHERE ta.user_id = 2
EDIT.
Just as a related note, even if you didn't do it the right way (which I described in my answer previously), doing it with hacks such as LIKE would still be far from the optimal solution. If you did store a list of comma-separated values, and needed to check if eg. the value 2 is in the list, you could use the MySQL's FIND_IN_SET function:
SELECT * FROM task WHERE FIND_IN_SET(2, for_emp)
But you shouldn't do this unless you have no choice (eg. you're working with someone's shitty DB design), because it's way more inefficient and won't let you index the the employee ID.
The following query should do what you want:
SELECT * FROM tasks WHERE for_emp LIKE '%2%';
However, be aware that that would also match employers 12, 20, 21 etc; so take care if you expect you might end up in double-digits.
However, the other answers about renormalising your database are definitely preferable.
You're doing it wrong. Create a relation table with two fields: employee id and task id. If one task should be assigned to three employees, insert three rows in the relation table.
You then use JOIN to join the task, employee and relation tables.
then its no proper relation...
I would suggest a "mapping table" for the n:m relation
employee
id
task
id
employeetask
task_id
employee_id
Make a table for your employers. Insert your three rows in it.
Then make a table for mapping tasks to employers. If a task is assigned to three employers, insert three rows into this table. This is basic entity-relation work.
I would make 2 different tables.
1 with employees, and 1 with tasks.
then make another table which combines the two tables, I will call it Assigned Tasks.
Then in assigned tasks I make a assigned id, a employeenumber which is a FK to the employee table and a taskid which is a FK to the Tasks table.
If an employee has more than 1 task. Just insert another row in the assigned table. ;)
When its about Databases, try to think in solo entities! Combining those entities is able in antoher table.
sql example:
Select * from Assignedtasks where employeeID = 1 will give you all his/her tasks. :)
You could use a LIKE '%,2,%' clause in your SELECT statement.
eg:
SELECT * FROM table where for_emp LIKE '%,2,%'
However performance of such non-sargable queries is usually quite bad.
I would suggest that you insert a row each for each employee who is assigned to the task using a separate TASK_EMPLOYEE_MAPPING table with taskId, employeeId as a composite primary key.
With such a design, your query will be
SELECT * FROM TASK_EMPLOYEE_MAPPING WHERE employeeId = '2'