Thanks for all your help guys but i wanted to pick up on these earlier comments. I think going with 0 and 1 for wins and losses makes sense. As for using ids instead of character usernames in my table - will this make a big difference. i thought about this at design stage but decided against it as i didnt really need ids as all usernames would be unique and assumed they would just be stored as hex or some kind of binary number value anyway and stored in the db in the most efficent way. Can someone explain whether going with numeric ids and using a userdetail table to get the actual character name would be better as in essence i would be reading 2 tables instead of 1 everytime i wanted a username. But will change if it is more efficient to go with numeric ids. Any thoughts?