SQL

August 2, 2011 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) (Forward to the Next Post in the Series) In the previous article in this series we tried to develop different methods for identifying special numbers between 1 and 1,000,000, such that the number formed by reversing the order of the digits will evenly divide into the original number.  [...]

July 31, 2011 (Forward to the Next Post in the Series) Years ago I played a couple of different games with letters, rather than numbers, on dice – attempting to form words from the letters displayed on top of the dice.  I was not very good with those games, and I recall attempting to create a [...]

July 28, 2011 I must say that I am impressed with the number of unique solutions that were developed for the previous coding challenge (FizzBuzz).  While not all solutions were extremely efficient (a couple were intentionally designed to be as inefficient as possible), the various techniques provide views of different approaches to solving a problem [...]

July 26, 2011 Through a web search I located a page titled “Coding Horror: Why Can’t Programmers.. Program?“  A simple question was asked in an interview, and apparently 199 of 200 programmers struggled to build a solution for the problem in less than ten minutes.  The problem must be that the 199 people who did not succeed [...]

July 18, 2011 I am surprised at the significant number of unique solutions to the SQL problems that I have previously posed on this blog.  For fun I thought that I would give people another chance to demonstrate their unique approaches to solving another problem. Supposed that a transaction table exists with the following definition: CREATE [...]

July 13, 2011 I am not entirely sure why, however a couple of days ago the following search keywords were used to access one or more articles on this blog: the sum of 1+2+3+4...+98+99+100 The above request I found to be a bit interesting, and there is a 50/50 chance that the person found the right answer [...]

July 11, 2011 Recently, the following search keywords were used to access an article on my site, and that search triggered an idea for another blog article: no_index hint oracle 10g not working  In Oracle Database, hints are directives that must be obeyed (with a couple of minor exceptions that include bugs).  I started wondering [...]

July 6, 2011 Since there were so many unique solutions to the last blog article that posed a SQL challenge, I thought that I would try another blog article that asks a similar type of question.  Assume that someone showed you the following output:  C2   D --- --- 100   0 150  50 200  50 201   1 [...]

July 1, 1011 A recent thread in the comp.databases.oracle.server Usenet group (actually two threads) asked an interesting question.  Assume that you had a detail table that contained several attributes for each of the unique key values.  How would one go about finding all of the unique key values that share the same set of attributes?  [...]

June 30, 2011 I saw an interesting search keyword the other day that generated several hits on my blog articles.  The search keyword was simply: WHERE MOD(ROWNUM,100) = 0 Just what is interesting about the above?  Had someone seen that syntax and wondered how it worked, or was someone trying to use that syntax and [...]