Arbitrary

Do you hate arbitrary requirements?  You know the ones — like: the customer account number must be a 10-digit number without any leading zeros and no more than 3 repeated digits?  Don’t you always try to argue the user back into letting you use a simple sequence generator — maybe giving in on the leading zero requirement, but arguing against trying to make sure there aren’t 3 of the same digits in a row?

Maybe if you thought there was a good reason, or authority or research on why that requirement was a good idea, then you’d see it as an interesting challenge rather than a burden?  Maybe if you read a post by Seth Godin about it?

Wonder if the user thinks that some of the database limitations are arbitrary?

So, today’s challenge — implement a stored procedure to generate such a serial number…