Skip to main content

PL/SQL Challenge approaches 1,000,000 answers....how should we celebrate?

Chris Saxon, the PL/SQL Challenge Database Design Quizmaster and Oracle Database Advocate for SQL and member of Ask Tom Answer Team, reminded me yesterday that the number of answers submitted on the PL/SQL Challenge is getting close to 1M.


Now in the, ahem, good old days, when we had a daily PL/SQL quiz, the 1M barrier would be smashed in short order. These days, with our sweep of weekly quizzes, we have a little more time before the earth-shaking event.

So I thought I'd reach out to my pals in the Oracle Database community - PL/SQL Challenge players and otherwise - and see if you had any fun, interesting ideas of how we might celebrate this milestone.

We've got some thoughts, but I'll hold off on sharing those until I hear from you.

Comments

  1. iudithFebruary 6, 2016 at 2:41 AM

    Hello Steven, All,
    This is maybe one of those great moments in life when one should look backward and say: "Yes, indeed, this was a very fruitful period of my life, it gave me a lot and I am really grateful to Steven first of all for having created the PL/SQL Challenge and, then, equally grateful to the entire PL/SQL Challenge community which kept it going: quiz authors, reviewers, players, and, not least, the team which develops, maintains and enhances the pl/sql challenge web site :)".

    What I once suggested in the past and maybe reiterate once again
    was to allow the players specify a little more about themselves,
    first of all, their age, of course, if they are willing to publish it. I was always extremely curious to know who am I competing with.

    Then, it would be nice if the players could take some time and specify a few quizzes that they liked most, along all these years.

    A nice indication in this direction could be produced by using
    the feedback information supplied by players, namely, to extract
    for each player the quizzes that he/she ranked with "5 stars"
    and publish a ranking of those quizzes by the number of votes,
    and possibly, allow us to view the effective list of players
    who voted "5 stars" for each quiz.
    Though feedback information is probably partial, it could however be interesting for those players that "use to compare themselves
    to others", and, I am pretty sure that most players do have their
    own "reference list" of players that they use to followup after ...

    And, if we step over to the realm of dreams ...
    I always dreamed of a great meeting face-to-face of the whole PL/SQL Challenge community ... don't know how, don't know where ...
    This will probably still remain a dream ... but it is so nice to have dreams, when real life offers mostly disappointments ...

    Thanks a lot & Best Regards,
    Iudith

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 8, 2018 at 4:38 AM

    Hello Iudith, I read this now for the first time. (08-08-2018) I want just to say "I enjoy reading it. It is grate!!

    Warm reagards,
    Hamid Talebian

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running out of PGA memory with MULTISET ops? Watch out for DISTINCT!

A PL/SQL team inside Oracle made excellent use of nested tables and MULTISET operators in SQL, blending data in tables with procedurally-generated datasets (nested tables).  All was going well when they hit the dreaded: ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 2032 bytes  They asked for my help.  The error occurred on this SELECT: SELECT  *    FROM header_tab trx    WHERE (generated_ntab1 SUBMULTISET OF trx.column_ntab)       AND ((trx.column_ntab MULTISET             EXCEPT DISTINCT generated_ntab2) IS EMPTY) The problem is clearly related to the use of those nested tables. Now, there was clearly sufficient PGA for the nested tables themselves. So the problem was in executing the MULTISET-related functionality. We talked for a bit about dropping the use of nested tables and instead doing everything in SQL, to avoid the PGA error. That would, however require lots of wo...
4 comments
Read more

How to Pick the Limit for BULK COLLECT

This question rolled into my In Box today: In the case of using the LIMIT clause of BULK COLLECT, how do we decide what value to use for the limit? First I give the quick answer, then I provide support for that answer Quick Answer Start with 100. That's the default (and only) setting for cursor FOR loop optimizations. It offers a sweet spot of improved performance over row-by-row and not-too-much PGA memory consumption. Test to see if that's fast enough (likely will be for many cases). If not, try higher values until you reach the performance level you need - and you are not consuming too much PGA memory.  Don't hard-code the limit value: make it a parameter to your subprogram or a constant in a package specification. Don't put anything in the collection you don't need. [from Giulio Dottorini] Remember: each session that runs this code will use that amount of memory. Background When you use BULK COLLECT, you retrieve more than row with each fetch, ...
4 comments
Read more

PL/SQL 101: Three ways to get error message/stack in PL/SQL

The PL/SQL Challenge quiz for 10 September - 16 September 2016 explored the different ways you can obtain the error message / stack in PL/SQL. Note: an error stack is a sequence of multiple error messages that can occur when an exception is propagated and re-raised through several layers of nested blocks. The three ways are: SQLERRM - The original, traditional and (oddly enough) not currently recommended function to get the current error message. Not recommended because the next two options avoid a problem which you are unlikely  to run into: the error stack will be truncated at 512 bytes, and you might lose some error information. DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_STACK - Returns the error message / stack, and will not truncate your string like SQLERRM will. UTL_CALL_STACK API - Added in Oracle Database 12c, the UTL_CALL_STACK package offers a comprehensive API into the execution call stack, the error stack and the error backtrace.  Note: check out this LiveSQL script if...
5 comments
Read more