I'm fairly new to SQL; For my university project we're creating a database for games, and reviewing said games. My issue is that I have a Table titled "Games", where it includes multiple attributes including a derived attribute 'Rating'; another table exists which is Member_rates_games, which includes 4 values, Uniqueness, Graphics, Design, and Interactivity. Now the issue is I don't know how to compute the 'Rating' Attribute using these 4 values in the other table. I Tried rating AS AVG(Uniquness, Interactivity, Design, Graphics), but it didn't work, the error being that it needs an argument. So how do I solve this? Do I resort to Joins? or is there another work around?
Here's the Schema if it can help:
Games (game_ID, name, release_date, age_limit, rating, email*)
Games_Rates_Members (game_ID, email, design, interactivity, graphics, uniqueness)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm using Visual Studio w/SQL Server, Not MYSQL. Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Looks like I worded the problem poorly, let my try again, So this is my current SQL Code:
CREATE TABLE Games(
game_id int IDENTITY,
name varchar (30) NOT NULL,
release_date date,
age_limit int NOT NULL,
rating int,
email varchar (50) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Games PRIMARY KEY (game_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Games FOREIGN KEY (email) References Development_teams )
CREATE TABLE Games_Rates_Members(
game_id int NOT NULL,
email varchar (50) NOT NULL,
design int NOT NULL,
interactivity int NOT NULL,
graphics int NOT NULL,
uniqueness int NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Games_Rates_Members PRIMARY KEY (game_id, email),
CONSTRAINT FK_Games_Rates_Members_1 FOREIGN KEY (game_id) References Games,
CONSTRAINT FK_Games_Rates_Members_2 FOREIGN KEY (email) References Members
)
Now, my issue is when I insert a value to the games table, in the rating attribute, what do I do in order for this rating attribute to be equivalent to the average of the 4 Values in the Games_Rates_Members Table. I hope this is more clear, excuse my English not being clear enough. Thanks again.
I think it is poor design to expect a value to populated automatically in the games table. This would mean every change to the ratings table would cascade a change to the games table.
This is not a leading or best practice with relational databases. In a relation database you define the relations of the data, not the data generation rules. Leave that to your select statements. You want to get an average for every game calculate it when you select the game. You could do that like this:
SELECT Games.game_id, AVG((GRM.design,GRM.interactivity,GRM.graphics,GRM.uniqueness)/4) as rating
FROM Games
JOIN Games_Rates_Members GRM ON Games.game_id = GRM.game_id
GROUP BY Games.game_id
Sidenote, I do not recommend using email as a user key. What happens if someone changes their email? Instead use an assigned unique integer key as the key.
Assuming those 4 values are numeric and you have many reviews for the same game from different users.
select game_ID, avg((design + interactivity + graphics + uniqueness)/4) as rating
from Games_Rates_Members
group by game_ID
Related
I'm trying to make a game called "Odds On". You may have played this before.
Two people decide on a range of numbers and a challenge/dare
They both say their chosen number within the range at the same time.
If the choices are the same, then whoever is 'it' has to complete the challenge/dare
I'm trying to learn and create an Ubuntu server with WinForm clients to make this game online.
With my current plan, I've run into a problem. I would like the game table to hold two user.username(s) as foreign keys as well as two round.roundID(s).
I've tried making the database in access and access said it could not enforce referential integrity
Can this be implemented in mySQL?? Perhaps using linking tables?
UML of what I'm trying to create
I would avoid MS-Access since it has several limitations that could hamper your learning of relational databases.
You can have many relationships between each pair of tables. Your example -- in PostgreSQL -- can look like:
create table users (
username varchar(20) primary key not null,
password varchar(20),
currently_logged_in int
);
create table round (
round_id int primary key not null,
user1_result int,
user2_result int
);
create table game (
game_id int primary key not null,
user1 varchar(20) references users (username),
user2 varchar(20) references users (username),
round1_id int references round (round_id),
round2_id int references round (round_id),
lower_bound int,
upper_bound int
);
See this example at db<>fiddle.
I have a relational database with a Client table, containing id, name, and address, with many phone numbers
and I have an Employee table, also containing id, name, address, etc., and also with many phone numbers.
Is it more logical to create one "Phone Number" table and link the Clients and Employees, or to create two separate "Phone Number" tables, one for Clients and one for Employees?
If I choose to create one table, can I use one foreign key for both the Client and Employee or do I have to make two foreign keys?
If I choose to make one foreign key, will I have to make the Client ids start at 1 and increment by 5, and Employee ids start at 2 and increment by 5 so the two ids will not be the same?
If I create two foreign keys will one have a value and the other allow nulls?
The solution which I would go with would be:
CREATE TABLE Employees (
employee_id INT NOT NULL,
first_name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
...
CONSTRAINT PK_Employees PRIMARY KEY (employee_id)
)
CREATE TABLE Customers (
customer_id INT NOT NULL,
customer_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
...
CONSTRAINT PK_Customers PRIMARY KEY (customer_id)
)
-- This is basic, only supports U.S. numbers, and would need to be changed to
-- support international phone numbers
CREATE TABLE Phone_Numbers (
phone_number_id INT NOT NULL,
area_code CHAR(3) NOT NULL,
prefix CHAR(3) NOT NULL,
line_number CHAR(4) NOT NULL,
extension VARCHAR(10) NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Phone_Numbers PRIMARY KEY (phone_number_id),
CONSTRAINT UI_Phone_Numbers UNIQUE (area_code, prefix, line_number, extension)
)
CREATE TABLE Employee_Phone_Numbers (
employee_id INT NOT NULL,
phone_number_id INT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Employee_Phone_Numbers PRIMARY KEY (employee_id, phone_number_id)
)
CREATE TABLE Customer_Phone_Numbers (
customer_id INT NOT NULL,
phone_number_id INT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Customer_Phone_Numbers PRIMARY KEY (customer_id, phone_number_id)
)
Of course, the model might changed based on a lot of different things. Can an employee also be a customer? If two employees share a phone number how will you handle it on the front end when the phone number for one employee is changed? Will it change the number for the other employee as well? Warn the user and ask what they want to do?
Those last few questions don't necessarily affect how the data is ultimately modeled, but will certainly affect how the front-end is coded and what kind of stored procedures you might need to support it.
"The Right Way", allowing you to use foreign keys for everything, would be to have a fourth table phoneNumberOwner(id) and have fields client.phoneNumberOwnerId and employee.phoneNumberOwnerId; thus, each client and each employee has its own record in the phoneNumberOwner table. Then, your phoneNumbers table becomes (phoneNumberOwnerId, phoneNumber), allowing you to attach multiple phone numbers to each phoneNumberOwner record.
Maybe you can somehow justify it, but to my way of thinking it is not logical to have employees and clients in the same table. It seems you wan to do this only so that your foreign keys (in the telephone-number table) all point to the same table. This is not a good reason for combining employees and clients.
Use three tables: employees, clients, and telephone-number. In the telephone table, you can have a field that indicates employee or client. As an aside, I don't see why telephone number needs to be a foreign key: that only adds complexity with very little benefit, imo.
Unless there are special business requirements I would expect a telephone number to be an attribute of an employee or client entity and not an entity in its own right.
If it were considered an entity in its own right it would be 'all key' i.e. its identifier is the compound of its attributes and has no attributes other than its identifier. If the sub-attributes aren't stored apart then it only has one attribute i.e. the telephone number itself! Therefore, it isn't usually 'interesting' enough to be an entity in its own right and a telephone numbers table, whether superclass or subclass, is usually overkill (as I say, barring special business requirements).
i am actually reading Doctrine Reference: One to Many, Unidirectional with Join table. but this will probably be more of a SQL quesiton. basically, this is supposed to model a one to many, unidirectional relationship. i guess from the PHP code (in that link), its such that 1 user have many phonenumbers.
the question is from the SQL, it seems like 1 user can have many phonenumbers. and 1 phonenumber can only belong to 1 user. am i right?
CREATE TABLE User (
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(id)
) ENGINE = InnoDB;
CREATE TABLE users_phonenumbers (
user_id INT NOT NULL,
phonenumber_id INT NOT NULL,
UNIQUE INDEX users_phonenumbers_phonenumber_id_uniq (phonenumber_id),
PRIMARY KEY(user_id,
phonenumber_id)
) ENGINE = InnoDB;
CREATE TABLE Phonenumber (
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(id)
) ENGINE = InnoDB;
ALTER TABLE users_phonenumbers ADD FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES User(id);
ALTER TABLE users_phonenumbers ADD FOREIGN KEY (phonenumber_id) REFERENCES Phonenumber(id);
can't i just simplify the database to ... below ... no need for join tables and what not?
Users (id, name)
Phonenumbers (id, user [FK], number)
Correct, these are two valid approaches to the same problem. And yes, the unique index on users_phonenumbers means that each phone number can belong to only one user.
The design is actually suboptimal.
The idea must have been that there are telephone numbers, users, and that they can be linked many-to-many. Because of the unique index on phonenumberid hoever, each number can only be assigned to one user.
Then the whole users_phonenumbers has become redundant, because they could just have added a userid column on the phonenumbers table and save themselves a join.
BAd table design if you ask me.
The goal is to store activities such as inserting, updating, and deleting business records.
One solution I'm considering is to use one table per record to be tracked. Here is a simplified example:
CREATE TABLE ActivityTypes
(
TypeId int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
TypeName nvarchar(50) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_ActivityTypes PRIMARY KEY (TypeId),
CONSTRAINT UK_ActivityTypes UNIQUE (TypeName)
)
INSERT INTO ActivityTypes (TypeName) VALUES ('WidgetRotated');
INSERT INTO ActivityTypes (TypeName) VALUES ('WidgetFlipped');
INSERT INTO ActivityTypes (TypeName) VALUES ('DingBatPushed');
INSERT INTO ActivityTypes (TypeName) VALUES ('ButtonAddedToDingBat');
CREATE TABLE Activities
(
ActivityId int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
TypeId int NOT NULL,
AccountId int NOT NULL,
TimeStamp datetime NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Activities PRIMARY KEY (ActivityId),
CONSTRAINT FK_Activities_ActivityTypes FOREIGN KEY (TypeId)
REFERENCES ActivityTypes (TypeId),
CONSTRAINT FK_Activities_Accounts FOREIGN KEY (AccountId)
REFERENCES Accounts (AccountId)
)
CREATE TABLE WidgetActivities
(
ActivityId int NOT NULL,
WidgetId int NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_WidgetActivities PRIMARY KEY (ActivityId),
CONSTRAINT FK_WidgetActivities_Activities FOREIGN KEY (ActivityId)
REFERENCES Activities (ActivityId),
CONSTRAINT FK_WidgetActivities_Widgets FOREIGN KEY (WidgetId)
REFERENCES Widgets (WidgetId)
)
CREATE TABLE DingBatActivities
(
ActivityId int NOT NULL,
DingBatId int NOT NULL,
ButtonId int,
CONSTRAINT PK_DingBatActivities PRIMARY KEY (ActivityId),
CONSTRAINT FK_DingBatActivities_Activities FOREIGN KEY (ActivityId)
REFERENCES Activities (ActivityId),
CONSTRAINT FK_DingBatActivities_DingBats FOREIGN KEY (DingBatId)
REFERENCES DingBats (DingBatId)
CONSTRAINT FK_DingBatActivities_Buttons FOREIGN KEY (ButtonId)
REFERENCES Buttons (ButtonId)
)
This solution seems good for fetching all activities given a widget or dingbat record id, however it doesn't seem so good for fetching all activities and then trying to determine to which record they refer.
That is, in this example, all the account names and timestamps are stored in a separate table, so it's easy to create reports focused on users and focused on time intervals without the need to know what the activity is in particular.
However, if you did want to report on the activities by type in particular, this solution would require determining to which type of activity the general activity table refers.
I could put all my activity types in one table, however the ID's would not be able to be constrained by a foreign key, instead the table name might be used as an id, which would lead me to use dynamic queries.
Note in the example that a DingBatActivity has an optional button Id. If the button name were to have been edited after being added to the dingbat, the activity would be able to refer to the button and know its name, so if a report listed all activities by dingbat and by button by name, the button name change would automatically be reflected in the activity description.
Looking for some other ideas and how those ideas compromise between programming effort, data integrity, performance, and reporting flexibility.
The way that I usually architect a solution to this problem is similar to inheritance in objects. If you have "activities" that are taking place on certain entities and you want to track those activities then the entities involved almost certainly have something in common. There's your base table. From there you can create subtables off of the base table to track things specific to that subtype. For example, you might have:
CREATE TABLE Objects -- Bad table name, should be more specific
(
object_id INT NOT NULL,
name VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Application_Objects PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (application_id)
)
CREATE TABLE Widgets
(
object_id INT NOT NULL,
height DECIMAL(5, 2) NOT NULL,
width DECIMAL(5, 2) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Widgets PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (object_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Widgets_Objects
FOREIGN KEY (object_id) REFERENCES Objects (object_id)
)
CREATE TABLE Dingbats
(
object_id INT NOT NULL,
label VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Dingbats PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (object_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Dingbats_Objects
FOREIGN KEY (object_id) REFERENCES Objects (object_id)
)
Now for your activities:
CREATE TABLE Object_Activities
(
activity_id INT NOT NULL,
object_id INT NOT NULL,
activity_type INT NOT NULL,
activity_time DATETIME NOT NULL,
account_id INT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Object_Activities PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (activity_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Object_Activities_Objects
FOREIGN KEY (object_id) REFERENCES Objects (object_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Object_Activities_Activity_Types
FOREIGN KEY (activity_type) REFERENCES Activity_Types (activity_type),
)
CREATE TABLE Dingbat_Activities
(
activity_id INT NOT NULL,
button_id INT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_Dingbat_Activities PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (activity_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Dingbat_Activities_Object_Activities
FOREIGN KEY (activity_id) REFERENCES Object_Activities (activity_id),
CONSTRAINT FK_Dingbat_Activities_Buttons
FOREIGN KEY (button_id) REFERENCES Object_Activities (button_id),
)
You can add a type code to the base activity if you want to for the type of object which it is affecting or you can just determine that by looking for existence in a subtable.
Here's the big caveat though: Make sure that the objects/activities really do have something in common which relates them and requires you to go down this path. You don't want to store disjointed, unrelated data in the same table. For example, you could use this method to create a table that holds both bank account transactions and celestial events, but that wouldn't be a good idea. At the base level they need to have something in common.
Also, I assumed that all of your activities were related to an account, which is why it's in the base table. Anything in common to ALL activities goes in the base table. Things relevant to only a subtype go in those tables. You could even go multiple levels deep, but don't get carried away. The same goes for the objects (again, bad name here, but I'm not sure what you're actually dealing with). If all of your objects have a color then you can put it in the Objects table. If not, then it would go into sub tables.
I'm going to go out on a limb and take a few wild guesses about what you're really trying to accomplish.
You say you're trying to track 'store activities' I'm going to assume you have the following activities:
Purchase new item
Sell item
Write off item
Hire employee
Pay employee
Fire employee
Update employee record
Ok, for these activities, you need a few different tables: one for inventory, one for departments, and one for employees
The inventory table could have the following information:
inventory:
item_id (pk)
description (varchar)
number_in_stock (number)
cost_wholesale (number)
retail_price (number)
dept_id (fk)
department:
dept_id (pk)
description (varchar)
employee
emp_id (pk)
first_name (varchar)
last_name (varchar)
salary (number)
hire_date (date)
fire_date (date)
So, when you buy new items, you will either update the number_in_stock in inventory table, or create a new row if it is an item you've never had before. When you sell an item, you decriment the number_in_stock for that item (also for when you write off an item).
When you hire a new employee, you add a record from them to the employees table. When you pay them, you grab their salary from the salary column. When you fire them, you fill in that column for their record (and stop paying them).
In all of this, the doing is not done by the database. SQL should be used for keeping track of information. It's fine to write procedures for doing these updates (a new invoice procedure that updates all the items from an invoice record). But you don't need a table to do stuff. In fact, a table can't do anything.
When designing a database, the question you need to ask is not "what do I need to do?" it is "What information do I need to keep track of?"
New answer, based on an different interpretation of the question.
Are you just trying to keep a list of what has happened? If you just need a ordered list of past events, you just need 1 table for it:
action_list
action_list_id (pk)
action_desc (varchar)
event_log:
event_log_id (pk)
event_time (timestamp)
action_list_id (fk)
new_action_added (fk)
action_details_or_description (varchar)
In this, the action_list would be something like:
1 'WidgetRotated'
2 'WidgetFlipped'
3 'DingBatPushed'
4 'AddNewAction'
5 'DeleteExistingAction'
The event_log would be a list of what activities happened, and when. One of your actions would be "add new action" and would require the 'new_action_added' column to be filled in on the event table anytime the action taken is "add new action".
You can create actions for update, remove, add, etc.
EDIT:
I added the action_details_or_description column to event. In this way, you can give further information about an action. For example, if you have a "product changes color" action, the description could be "Red" for the new color.
More broadly, you'll want to think through and map out all the different types of actions you'll be taking ahead of time, so you can set up your table(s) in a way that can accurately contain the data you want to put into them.
How about the SQL logs?
The last time I needed a database transaction logger I used an Instead Of trigger in the database so that it would instead of just updating the record, the database would insert a new record into the log table. This technique meant that I needed an additional table to hold the log for each table in my database and the log table had an additional column with a time stamp. Using this technique you can even store the pre and post update state of the record if you want to.
I currently have multiple tables in my database which consist of the same 'basic fields' like:
name character varying(100),
description text,
url character varying(255)
But I have multiple specializations of that basic table, which is for example that tv_series has the fields season, episode, airing, while the movies table has release_date, budget etc.
Now at first this is not a problem, but I want to create a second table, called linkgroups with a Foreign Key to these specialized tables. That means I would somehow have to normalize it within itself.
One way of solving this I have heard of is to normalize it with a key-value-pair-table, but I do not like that idea since it is kind of a 'database-within-a-database' scheme, I do not have a way to require certain keys/fields nor require a special type, and it would be a huge pain to fetch and order the data later.
So I am looking for a way now to 'share' a Primary Key between multiple tables or even better: a way to normalize it by having a general table and multiple specialized tables.
Right, the problem is you want only one object of one sub-type to reference any given row of the parent class. Starting from the example given by #Jay S, try this:
create table media_types (
media_type int primary key,
media_name varchar(20)
);
insert into media_types (media_type, media_name) values
(2, 'TV series'),
(3, 'movie');
create table media (
media_id int not null,
media_type not null,
name varchar(100),
description text,
url varchar(255),
primary key (media_id),
unique key (media_id, media_type),
foreign key (media_type)
references media_types (media_type)
);
create table tv_series (
media_id int primary key,
media_type int check (media_type = 2),
season int,
episode int,
airing date,
foreign key (media_id, media_type)
references media (media_id, media_type)
);
create table movies (
media_id int primary key,
media_type int check (media_type = 3),
release_date date,
budget numeric(9,2),
foreign key (media_id, media_type)
references media (media_id, media_type)
);
This is an example of the disjoint subtypes mentioned by #mike g.
Re comments by #Countably Infinite and #Peter:
INSERT to two tables would require two insert statements. But that's also true in SQL any time you have child tables. It's an ordinary thing to do.
UPDATE may require two statements, but some brands of RDBMS support multi-table UPDATE with JOIN syntax, so you can do it in one statement.
When querying data, you can do it simply by querying the media table if you only need information about the common columns:
SELECT name, url FROM media WHERE media_id = ?
If you know you are querying a movie, you can get movie-specific information with a single join:
SELECT m.name, v.release_date
FROM media AS m
INNER JOIN movies AS v USING (media_id)
WHERE m.media_id = ?
If you want information for a given media entry, and you don't know what type it is, you'd have to join to all your subtype tables, knowing that only one such subtype table will match:
SELECT m.name, t.episode, v.release_date
FROM media AS m
LEFT OUTER JOIN tv_series AS t USING (media_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN movies AS v USING (media_id)
WHERE m.media_id = ?
If the given media is a movie,then all columns in t.* will be NULL.
Consider using a main basic data table with tables extending off of it with specialized information.
Ex.
basic_data
id int,
name character varying(100),
description text,
url character varying(255)
tv_series
id int,
BDID int, --foreign key to basic_data
season,
episode
airing
movies
id int,
BDID int, --foreign key to basic_data
release_data
budget
What you are looking for is called 'disjoint subtypes' in the relational world. They are not supported in sql at the language level, but can be more or less implemented on top of sql.
You could create one table with the main fields plus a uid then extension tables with the same uid for each specific case. To query these like separate tables you could create views.
Using the disjoint subtype approach suggested by Bill Karwin, how would you do INSERTs and UPDATEs without having to do it in two steps?
Getting data, I can introduce a View that joins and selects based on specific media_type but AFAIK I cant update or insert into that view because it affects multiple tables (I am talking MS SQL Server here). Can this be done without doing two operations - and without a stored procedure, natually.
Thanks
Question is quite old but for modern postresql versions it's also worth considering using json/jsonb/hstore type.
For example:
create table some_table (
name character varying(100),
description text,
url character varying(255),
additional_data json
);