Reddit mentions of Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design

Architecture of a Database System
http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf

Readings in Database Systems
http://www.redbook.io

Computer Science 186, 001 - Spring 2015 UCBerkeley Introduction to Database Systems - Joseph Hellerstein
https://archive.org/details/UCBerkeley_Course_Computer_Science_186

Stanford's Databases MOOC
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html

Database Design by Caleb Curry
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_c9BZzLwBRK0Pc28IdvPQizD2mJlgoID

Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design (3rd Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/0321884493

More at http://Learn.SharjeelSayed.com

Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321884493/

The application that you're trying to make (per you, similar to Futhead.com) is data-centric, and therefore, I'd say it'd be about time for you to learn proper data storage, manipulation and querying.

If you're looking to build anything near this website, then you're probably going to want to start learning SQL - as you'll most likely be doing complex queries for your site.

I would check out CodeSchool's SQL courses, it's a slow, easy course covering the basics of the language.

Once you feel comfortable querying data, start learning a database technology. If websites will be your aim, then I suggest MySQL just due to the infinite number of resources that are MySQL and web related. (My preference is Postgres, but the tutorials revolving around Postgres and web development are much less common, however the official documentation for Postgres is much better than MySQL).

Play around with the database, learn to create some tables, insert some data, query the data, etc. When you're ready to take the next step, I'd encourage you to pick up the book Database Design for Mere Mortals. It's a great entry-level resource into learning relational database theory and its practical application.

Once you've learned to store your data, manipulate your data, and query your data then throwing the data you currently have in your excel spreadsheet will be a breeze. As will connecting your site/application to the database.

I do not recommend programming around parsing an excel spreadsheet if you're at all serious about this project.

I strongly recommend Database Design for Mere mortals. Though your question is on SQL, I am not sure if you are that specific.

Query language is a way in which you can express your understanding of the concepts (entities), how they relate to each other (relationships) and the business a particular database is addressing. Being able to write excellent queries depends on how well you understand the database structure itself.

That's why understanding database design is actually more relevant to your query, IMO. Think of it this way - once you understand the database structure, you understand everything about the company's business.

Simple and to-the-point book:
Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez

Leads you through requirements analysis to actual database design and refactoring, explaining all the needs for constraints, keys and other stuff on the way.

Database Design for Mere Mortals

If you're working in an enterprise environment, then most likely your data will live - at the source, in a transaction-based database (OLTP). For this, I'd recommend Database Design for Mere Mortals - it's a well written book that is more heavily based on the practical application of how your data is architected, designed and stored and less on the theoretical side of things - but it's written in a way I feel most any learned person can understand. For theoretical review, there's always the seminal work of E.F. Codd's A Relational Model For Large Shared Data Banks and also some of his follow up work The Relational Model for Database Management

From the analytical database side of things (Data Warehouses/BI Solutions) and, where hopefully you'll actually be pulling and manipulating your data from there is The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling - this is a more verbose read - and not practical, but more thought experiment provoking and includes the business reasons why dimensional modeling should be used so that Data Science/Data Analytics professionals can get at their data - nevertheless - for most large companies this is the "foundation" by which your data sits on if you're a Data Scientist. I, unfortunately, do not have a good recommendation for the practical application of OLAP databases as I've never found one that generally tickled my fancy.

Just skimming through these and periodically reading through them should at least give you an idea about how your data is stored, which more importantly gives you an idea around how it can be pulled and manipulated by the systems within your company.

As an example, I had a hard time explaining once to a research assistant why I couldn't 100% match two free-text string fields with names in them to one another in a large data set. I tried explaining to him that while there is fuzzy string matching algorithms I can apply to a given data set (Like Jaro-Winkler or Levenshtein), that it wasn't always 100% and was an approximation - I guess he wanted me to further the field of Computer Science by making fuzzy string matching 100% and therefore doing what many CS and Stats gurus haven't been able to do -shrugs-.

I really love these two books.
https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/0321884493/
https://www.amazon.com/SQL-Queries-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/0321992474/

Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design

In college we read Database Design for Mere Mortals, and I thought it was pretty amazing (if a bit dry). Helps I had a great professor though.

https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/0321884493

Sorry I'm coming in here so late, but "Database Design for Mere Mortals" is where I learned from.

Good tables, good relationships, good life.

Warning: Databases are not easy. There's a reason that some folks specialize in them.

I recommend [SQL Queries for Mere Mortals ($36.64)](SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321992474/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_nCQrybW9TPPNN) and [Database Design for Mere Mortals ($31.57)](Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321884493/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_CDQrybA2508FS)

Both helped guide me through my masters program, and they are fairly affordable.

Database design for mere mortals is an excellent reference I've kept throughout the years. It has my recommendation.

As you figured out, this isn't an SQL issue, it's a database normalization issue.

You wouldn't have a table of winners and a table of losers -- you'd have a table of teams, and a table of matches that links them together, and a table of players, and a table of stats. and you'd link them all together using various linking tables.

I used this book when learning about setting up databases.

[Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael Hernandez.]
(https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/0321884493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517536285&sr=8-1&keywords=database+design+for+mere+mortals)

I found this book really useful: Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321884493/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_-XVEyb2Y4PZX3

Walks you through the design process, and it's tool/language agnostic, so it explains the concepts without getting into the weeds with the code