The Best Database
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If you've read these editorials long enough, you might realize that I'm a big sports fan. I love the big 4, US football, basketball, and baseball. I used to play all of them, now limited to baseball by my aging body, and I've encouraged my son to play them as well. I'm hoping my daughter will get more involved in the next few years as well since she'll be old enough to really play.
So the other day my wife asks me as I'm sitting there watching the Rockies on TV, what sport I most enjoy watching. My answer was a question, "Live or TV?" since it matters. Live I prefer baseball, going to the ballpark, the relaxing way the game moves, the ability to enjoy the view from pretty much anywhere in the stadium, etc. On TV, football. No comparison there.
So I started thinking about it and came up with this poll:
Which sport needs the best database?
By this I mean which sport really collects, distributes, and needs some database horsepower in the modern world. There are a lot of sports in the world, but there are really only 6 or 7 huge sports in the world: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, NASCAR/racing. I guess golf is up there, not sure what else places big demands on a database. I'm skipping the Olympics because any one of those sports is a trivial matter to handle.
So what do I think?
Well it can't be hockey or soccer. They don't score enough and I just don't think there are that many statistical categories needed to track the professional leagues. NASCAR? C'mon, they count wins/losses and points and that's about it. Baseketball gets a lot of numbers in the game, but I'm not sure how stressful the game is to a database.
To me it's probably baseball, with all the fantasy teams, the long schedules, the devotion to numbers in the game, I think the MLB database is probably the biggest and used a tremendous amount. Football has grown tremendously, and the fantasy aspect of football might require more realtime work these days, but I'm still picking baseball for now.
So what do you think? One of these sports? A different one? Let me know.
Steve Jones
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Australian Rules Football.
We're stats mad over here. Especially with the different types of possesions (gets vs. hard-ball gets).
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I don't think too much can compete with test cricket. The game has a very long history and the structure of the entire complex game is a statistician's dream! Consider just some of the dimensions:
- each game is played over 5 days divided into sessions with 90 overs per day of 6 balls each
- stats depend heavily upon the innings and stage of the game becuase the wicket changes over the 5 days
- bowlers are measured of speed and type of delivery; lbw/catch/bowled descisions; record against individual batsmen and teams; wickets taken per session/match/day of test; etc
- batsmen are rated by strike rate; bounderies scored; total runs; runs over time period; etc
- fielders are measured by catches taken in particular positions
- each pitch around the world is unique and has a significant influence on the game - as do teh groundsmen who prepare the pitch and outfield
- field placements are almost endless
- umpire descisions are crucial to the game
...and this is really only the tip of the iceberg!
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You've missed out the 3rd most watched sport in the world, Formula 1 motor racing!
And when it comes to data logging, those guys log everything any anything, I bet without a doubt their databases are massive for each team and combined for all 10 teams simply gigantic on a per race basis let alone a full season. Everything is logged so they can replay the race after the race, tune the cars, plan strategies... the lot. And this is before you even consider the out of season design work they do
All of this probably comes about because it's a technology sport rather than relying on just human abilities, when you spend $100million (on average) per season per team, you database capabilities are probably quite substantial. I mean, how many companies that turn over $100mill a year don't need good databases?
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Yup, Formula 1
Having done Content Management work for one of the top teams I know that at the team level they have more data than anyone......
except maybe those guys doing live "round the world" sailing races like the Volvo Cup that's near finishing. Remember with those races you have months of data on each movement and sailset for each boat AND with a toy like Virtual Spectator you can replay the race when you want to watch a segment.
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It is not the complexity of the sport that drives the database needs. The complexity of the media operation around the sport requires complexity a few orders of magnitude greater than anything required by spectators watching live action.
Try talking to the people who run the IT infrastructure for the Olympics or other major multi-sport events such as the Commonwealth Games and you will see that these have the most complex database and IT needs of any sporting occasion.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
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Both Rugby Football and Cricket are played by more people (prety much all the countries which were part of the British Empire) than American Grid Iron, I suspect. In cricket, the latest innovation is a technique which captures the flight trajectory of each ball bowled for later analysis. In rugby, prety much the same sort of data is generated and kept as is done in American Football. With more people playing, more data must be generated. And then we can consider soccer (English football) as well. It also has a fast crowd of people playing it. Almost all countries in the world.
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I think when you look at the stats, the world's most popular sport by a very long way is fishing. But maybe a database for fishing is not such a good idea... accuracy when saying "I caught one THIS big" may not be universely popular.
PS, Never seen the point of standing in a stream up to my b***s in freezing water just to get a fish to eat a drowned worm, but some people tell me I've missed out on a life.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
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I think cricket can beat baseball as far as collection of numbers and statistics is required.
What do you say of a sport which goes on for 6 - 7 hours for 5 consequtive days and nobody loses.
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The most statistics intensive game would be cricket in both forms, one day as well as the test cricket.
The kind of statistics that is churned out for each and every player and the respective team is tremendous.
There is lot of historical data displayed and the game of cricket needs continuous updation of score statistics.
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I reckon it comes down to what you track. If you track teams, games etc then the other sports have quite a lot of data.
But for tracking on an individual and game basis golf is pretty big. It's been around a long time. There are stats for each day of each tournament of each country. Stats by player are tremendous. They will record each and every shot that a player hits, what club he used, how far the ball went, where it landed, how it affected the hole, the round, the day, the championship. These will all be used to create season and career stats per player, per tournament. All of these stats are used to create further stats.
If a golf ball falls in the woods there will be a statistical probability to it. (Probability that it was hit by Tiger Woods 76.5%)
So, although it's maybe not reckoned as a Big Sport. The statisticians more than make up for that.
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I love the big 4, US football, basketball, and baseball.
Erm glad you are not setting up my data structures Steve, seems you have a counting issue
.I would also argue a lot in favour of football, or rather soccer as you call it having a lot of stats on a player/team basis (hate the game myself but I think you will find globally it is played a lot more than American Football)
I would tend to agree though that for pure data it would be F1 - but it is a different kind of data to the fan data that is being collected for the other sports.
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Having been involved in racing and thus having direct knowledge of the amount of data collected, I would have to say that motor sport of most any type would involve the largest collections of data.
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I'll vote for all of the top forms of racing (I'm partial to MotoGP motorcycle racing). Like NASCAR and other huge-dollar racing genres, the number of sensors recording real-time data streams makes for lots and lots of data.
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