Skip to main content

Nine Years at the Oracle Dev Gym

Waaaaay back in 2010, on April 8 to be specific, I started a website called the PL/SQL Challenge. It featured a daily PL/SQL quiz (yes, that's right - a new quiz every weekday!) and gave Oracle Database developers a way to both deepen and demonstrate their expertise. Players were ranked and competed for top honors in our annual championships.

Not quite as waaaaay back, in 2014, I rejoined Oracle Corporation after 22 years away (from the company, not from the technology). The PL/SQL Challenge came with me, and a year later we rebranded it as the Oracle Dev Gym.

Today, we offer quizzes on SQL, PL/SQL, database design, logic, Java and Application Express. We've added workouts and classes.

Yesterday we celebrated the ninth anniversary of the Dev Gym / PL/SQL Challenge. And my oh my but Oracle Database developers have been busy!


Here are some stats from those nine years:
  • Almost 35,000 developers and DBAs have taken quizzes on the site, a total of 1.27M answers submitted.
  • They spent a total of over 118 YEARS of their cumulative time taking quizzes, workouts and classes.
  • Their average grade on quizzes is 75% (we have a lot of tough quizzes!).
  • Roughly 3,500 developers have been active on the site in the last three months.
  • We've had almost 35,000 sign-ups for our Dev Gym classes (the most popular being Chris Saxon's Databases for Developers classes).
  • Individual workouts have also been very popular, with just under 33,000 taken.
I'd also like to give a shout-out and big thanks to the following major contributors to the success of the Dev Gym:

  • Kim Berg Hansen, SQL quizmaster, author of hundreds of amazing SQL quizzes
  • Chris Saxon, Database Design quizmaster, creator of Databases for Developers class series
  • Rafael del Nero, Java quizmaster (new to 2018!), and Java Champion
  • Eli Feuerstein, our lead APEX developer
  • Elic (Vitaliy Lyanchevskiy), our ace database quiz reviewer, who has had an enormous positive impact on our quiz quality
  • Livo Curzola, our logic quiz reviewer, for his long and careful career checking over Eli's quizzes

The Dev Gym has become an essential part of the learning experience for thousands of developers. They've discovered new features of the database, learned from other developers, and even written their own quizzes for everyone to play.

If you haven't yet tried the Dev Gym, come check it out! Take a quiz, sign up for a class (they are on-demand, take them at your own pace) or take a workout. 



Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 30, 2019 at 2:52 AM

    Number 1 in this week's logic quiz.
    Does it get any better than that?
    (obviously not!)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE should not be in your application code

A database developer recently came across my  Bulletproof PL/SQL  presentation, which includes this slide. That first item in the list caught his attention: Never put calls to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE in your application code. So he sent me an email asking why I would say that. Well, I suppose that is the problem with publishing slide decks. All the explanatory verbiage is missing. I suppose maybe I should do a video. :-) But in the meantime, allow me to explain. First, what does DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE do? It writes text out to a buffer, and when your current PL/SQL block terminates, the buffer is displayed on your screen. [Note: there can be more to it than that. For example, you could in your own code call DBMS_OUTPUT.GET_LINE(S) to get the contents of the buffer and do something with it, but I will keep things simple right now.] Second, if I am telling you not to use this built-in, how could text from your program be displayed on your screen? Not without a lot o...
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