Hey, im new to pretty much anything in this field, but im trying to figure out how to go about making site that would help me get a good average by input from people who visited my site and they woudl enter info... i will explain.

I would like to create a table of say 16 participants, all of each will have to fight each other. The table will be 16x16 and in each box, it will have the statistics that have been input from visitors to the site. They will be given the option of numbers from 1-10 of how many times person A could beat Person B out of 10 matches. Like for example, the person would pick "contestant A" and would go through a list of each of his opponents and rate how well they think he would do. People would come to the site and eventually lots of ratings would be entered and stored in a database. This database would have to be able to put out a chart of the 16x16 based on an AVERAGE of the votes entered from everyone who has voted.



1. What tools do i need? I have come to realize i will need some dbasing to store this info and help me figure out averages.

2. I have very limited web page design knowledge and limited dbase knowledge (minor MS Access). Is what i need simple enough for me to handle or do i need help? Im no dbase pro by any means, but im no dummy and i can figure out stuff pretty well.

3. Am i in the right forum for this and is this a clear presentation of what i would like?

Bump? Can anyone help?

Keep in mind that you are asking for opinions, so I'll give you mine.

If you are expecting less than 5,000 responses, then I'd expect that MS-Access (actually the Jet database engine) would be good enough to get you by. From 5,000 to 25,000 is kind of iffy, but Jet might still do Ok. Beyond that, you really need to use at least MSDE if not full blown SQL-Server.

The code wouldn't change much, so that isn't really an issue. You just need to "saddle up a bigger pony" in the database area if the job gets larger.

-PatP

yeah, i dont expect alot more than 5000. But HOW do i integrate Access with a webpage?

Microsoft FrontPage works pretty well. ColdFusion has a lot of fans, as doe DreamWeaver. There are lots of tools that help you build web pages, and many of them include the ability to incorporate data into the process. Pick one that suits you, and have at it!

-PatP

First of all, in your scenario, "16 is a magic number." You envision that there could never be more than 16 so you conceive of the problem as being solved bya 16x16 matrix, yet this is almost certainly not the "correct" or "appropriate" representation.

The more-appropriate representation, in the database, would probably be a large table of rows consisting of, e.g. {id_of_participant_who_sez, participant_1, participant_2, I_think_probability_is}. This is how the data would be stored, and you observe that the "16" number is completely gone. There is now no limit on the number of participants... none whatsoever.

The results can now be evaluated by a query such as SELECT participant_1, participant_2, AVG(I_think_probability_is) ... and once again, those results come out as a big long list, not a matrix. So your display code now has to read that list, populate a (say...) 16x16 matrix, and display the matrix in tabular form.

Lots of n00bies make this mistake and create table structures with so-called "repeating fields" with 16 slightly-different names. They build apps that absolutely cannot handle "17" without being re-designed. And, they short-circuit the powerful grouping and querying abilities of SQL.

Almost always, the "appropriate structure for representing your data" is not "how the end-user would like to view it."