As many of you can probably tell, one of my the things I enjoy doing is to pick NFL games every week. Right now, I track my picks in an excel spreadsheet. Not exactly ideal, but it works. And it has for the past two years.

But as I start to look at history, it gets to be a pain to manually look back over games. For example, last week, I looked at all of the games I tracked that had a spread of 10 or more points to determine how the favored team did. It was a manual process, and very error prone. I got a number, but I'm not positive it was right. As I go forward, and I hope to, it's only going to get worse.

If only there was a storage medium that was easy to query!

So my new pet project is to write a system to track my NFL picks, and run at least a few simple queries. So here's part one. My database design. At least now, I can put my picks in the database, and build the application around it. It's a simple database design thus far. 5 tables.

Here's the design:

Like I said, it's nothing spectacular. It's simple, but effective. It allows me to track everything that I track now.

My goals with this are still in limbo. The thought just kind of popped into my head today, so we'll see where it goes. Here's some thoughts though. Sorry for the randomness. I've intermixed technical with functional requirements.

• Use a O/R mapper for database access
• Unit testing completely throughout the process, including on the database
• The ability for multiple users to enter picks, and be able to be compared to eachother.
• Reports

I haven't totally thought it through yet, but with this agile thing working at work, why not apply it at home too? Eventually, things will solidify, and I'll post about decisions. My goal is to make my design and development process open. This may be a slow process, as I'm very busy, but I'll give it a try.

My last pet project died a quick death, mainly because I wasn't attached to it. This one, well, I'm slightly more attached to, so hopefully that will make the difference. Only time will tell, though, I guess.

UPDATE: I added a SeasonName to the Seasons table (thanks, Steve), and changed the datatype on the SeasonId column. Also, I added data types to the image.