What is the best database schema to represent an NCAA mens basketball bracket? Here is a link if you aren't familiar: http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/mayhem/brackets/viewable_men
I can see several different ways you could model this data, with a single table, many tables, hard-coded columns, somewhat dynamic ways, etc. You need a way to model both what seed and place each team is in, along with each game and the outcome (and possibly score) of each. You also need a way to represent who plays who at what stage in the tournament.
In the spirit of March Madness, I thought this would be a good question. There are some obvious answers here, and the main goal of this question is to see all of the different ways you could answer it. Which way is best could be subjective to the language you are using or how exactly you are working with it, but try to keep the answers db agnostic, language agnostic and fairly high level. If anyone has any suggestions on a better way to word this question or a better way to define it let me know in the comments.
For a RDBMS, I think the simplest approach that's still flexible enough to accommodate the majority of situations is to do the following:
Teams has [team-id (PK)], [name], [region-id (FK to Regions)], [initial-seed]. You will have one entry for each team. (The regions table is a trivial code table with only four entries, one for each NCAA region, and is not listed here.)
Participants has [game-id (FK to Games)], [team-id (FK to Teams)], [score (nullable)], [outcome]. [score] is nullable to reflect that a team might forfeit. You will have typically have two Participants per Game.
Games has [game-id (PK)], [date], [location]. To find out which teams played in a game, look up the appropriate game-id in the Participants table. (Remember, there might be more than two teams if someone dropped out or was disqualified.)
To set up the initial bracket, match the appropriate seeds to each other. As games are played, note which team has outcome = Winner for a particular game; this team is matched up against the winner of another game. Fill in the bracket until there are no more winning teams left.