🚀 go-pugleaf

willson@seas.gwu.edu (Stephen R. Willson) writes:

>    Monday's baseball expansion draft got me thinking about a database
>question.  During at least the first round of the draft, no more than one
>player from each team could be taken by Tampa or Denver.  If I for some
>reason had setup a database of all the players eligible for the draft, how
>could I implement this restriction.  If one player from the Boston Red Sox
>has already been selected, how could I lock out selecting a second player
>from the Red Sox? 

the two ways that spring to mind immediately are:

1) every time a person is selected from the eligible list, remove all
his teammates from the eligible list.  that way it's not possible to
select someone from the same team because they are no longer available.

2) keep track of the players selected.  when a new player is selected,
search the selected players list to see if there is already someone
there from the same team before validating the new selection.

> Does a database program exist that makes such
>restrictions easy to implement?

i use 4th dimension, and i would find it pretty easy to implement
something like this, but that is probably because i have been using it
for 3+ years.

>  One particular application which I am
>interested in is evaluating economic proposals which are either mutually
>exclusive, mutually dependent, or mutually independent of other proposals.
> Does anyone have experience with designing a database for such an
>application?

sounds interesting;  but i haven't done anything like that before...

--mike