Getting scores from MySQL - better option than sub-queries? - mysql

Question

I'm building a website for a friend (kind of a hobby thing, not for anything pro/work related) that'll store information about players, games and scores. I have built most of the reporting/statistical info but I want to display how many times a player hit the max score and am wondering if I can improve my idea (based on sub-queries). My 'scores' table is set out as so:
scores (id, gameID, playerID, venueID, versusID, score1, score2, score3, score4, score5, total, seasonID) - all the xID's are foreign keys.
The premise is that a new entry is made per game, per player so I have PHP insert data from text fields etc. This means that say there's 20 games in a season and for score1 'John Smith' hits the max score of 10 4 times that season. But he also hits it 8 times on score2, 6 times on score3 etc (and obviously, these could be in different games). So at the end of the season, I have a big table with a load of results in (I'd have 240 rows given there's 12 players per team) and when I'm looking at my stats, I want to find out how many times John Smith hit a 10 that season. I can obviously do 5 queries (or 1 with sub-queries) and add the results to tell me this, but I'm wondering what's the best method (or the one the 'SQL guru' would use, if you like) purely for my own development.
So to finish: I'm hoping to run my query and get a resultset that tells me:
Name | Total
John Smith | 12
Rob Smith | 11
Will Smith | 11
etc... | 1
The firstName and secondName are stored in the 'player' table (which is linked to the 'scores' table by the playerID foreign key). I'd like to be able to modify the query later on-demand if I wish, for example if I wanted to see how many times players scored a 9 rather than a 10 (but that can obviously be done by passing the number via PHP).
Searching here (+ Google) has lead me down the 'JOIN' route but I've not had much success. Any help, please? :)

Answer 1

I think this should do the trick:
SELECT playerID, COUNT(playerID) AS Total FROM (
SELECT playerID FROM scores WHERE score1='10'
UNION ALL
SELECT playerID FROM scores WHERE score2='10'
UNION ALL
SELECT playerID FROM scores WHERE score3='10'
UNION ALL
SELECT playerID FROM scores WHERE score4='10'
UNION ALL
SELECT playerID FROM scores WHERE score5='10'
) AS thetable
GROUP BY playerID
Where 10 is the score you want.

Answer 2

This will get the playerID with respective number of 10 scores:
select
playerID,
count(score1 = 10 or null) +
count(score2 = 10 or null) +
count(score3 = 10 or null) +
count(score4 = 10 or null) +
count(score5 = 10 or null)
as total
from scores
group by playerID
having total > 0
Join it to the player table to get the names.