6th February 2017

Hi ,

Last week we started looking at the process of building your own horse racing database. While I'm focussing on horse racing, this guide could be easily modified to help you build any kind of sports betting database.

You should have decided exactly how you want to use your database, and what information you will need to extract from it. Don't forget that you want to think about how you're going to use it both now and in the future.

The choice of which software you're going to use to develop your database is the next stage, and there's an overwhelming variety to choose from. First of all it's important to know whether you're going to want to run the database only on your home computer/laptop or whether you will want to run it through a server.

Generally the software to build databases on your home computer/laptop is simpler and cheaper to use. Two of the most commonly used programs are:

Microsoft Access
Filemaker Pro

The big question is, are there any limitations to this software?

There's a huge range of opinion on this. The users of these programs say that they can do everything in them that can be done in the bigger server based programs, while most database programmers I know will argue the opposite.

If you already know how to use one of them in detail and do not need to host your database on a server, then that's the software I recommend that you use. Ultimately the time spent learning another piece of software is not worth it unless absolutely necessary.

If you're going to have to learn how to use the software, or hire a programmer, then I'd suggest choosing a server based software. This means that you have the option available to use it on a server in the future if you wish, but you can also install these pieces of software on your home machine. Three of the most popular database programs are:

Microsoft SQL
MySQL
Oracle

The one that I use is MySQL. This doesn’t mean that it's the best, just that it's the best for me.

First of all let us talk about the others. When I say others I mean Microsoft SQL primarily as I honestly don't know much about Oracle. Some programmers love Oracle and the only reason that I've never used it is because I've had more experience with the others and never had the need to learn how.

It's important to clarify that I'm not a database programmer. While I understand the concepts and structures and can use databases at a medium level of ability, I use a programmer for most of my database work. A lot of the programming is done using a programming language known as PHP. This is what websites primarily use as well.

Anyway, back to Microsoft SQL. It's a very powerful database system, but in my experience has one problem. It's a Microsoft product.

This means that it's comparatively expensive to run and, more importantly, it needs Windows to run on. This is fine if you're using a computer at home, but if you want to put it on a server this means having to have a Windows server which is significantly more expensive than a Linux one. You then have to pay for the license to run MS (Microsoft) SQL on the server, and if you need to hire a programmer they're usually more expensive than other database programmers.

MySQL on the other hand, has the perfect price tag of... FREE!

It's an open source software. While they do have versions that require yearly payments, it's unlikely that you would ever need to have these.

MySQL has the added benefit of being installed, by default, on pretty much every hosted account or server that exists. And it can work on any operating system.

Because it is open source, there's almost limitless programmers available who can use it which means that if you need to hire a programmer, the cost is significantly less.

Be warned though, if you use one of the myriad of freelance sites, such as Rent-a-Coder, to find a programmer you should be wary of using those who don't have fluent English (or a language you are fluent in). Your programmer will need to have a very good understanding of horse racing in order to program properly for you and this can be hard enough to explain when there is not a language barrier.

MySQL is a command line program which means that everything is run from a little black window by typing in commands. Although quite intimidating it's not too hard to learn, but if you're running it on a windows machine then for less than $100 you can get software that gives you access to MySQL through a GUI (graphical user interface). And on a Mac, you can get the same for free!

Am I slightly biased towards MySQL?

Definitely, and for that reason I'm going to leave you now to make your own decision on the best software for your project. Next week we shall come to the next part in this series... How To Structure Your Tables.

Best Wishes,

Michael Wilding