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The Voice of the DBA

Learning through Puzzles

A few years ago I ran across the Advent of Code challenge. It's an interesting set of puzzles that you are asked to solve. Most are at a scale that wouldn't be practical to solve manually. Once you solve a puzzle, there is usually a second part that's unlocked (you must put in the solution) and then your progress is tracked on the site. A new puzzle is released every day leading up to Christmas, but you can skip around and solve puzzles as you like after that. I had fun in 2016 working through puzzles in T-SQL, PoSh, and Python. I need to go back and work the 2017 items.

Recently I was trying to brush up on some Python skills and ran across the PythonHow challenge. Before going on to rework some exercises and coursework, I decided to see what I remembered. The puzzles are easy, but one leads you to the next. In other words, you start with pythonhow.com/start, when you solve the puzzle, you get a letter, say "r" (that's not right). You change the URL to pythonhow.com/r/ and you get the next challenge.

That's a neat way to get build a flow. I could imagine that as a way of teaching someone new skills. Maybe you want to help someone learn R (currently our Wednesday Questions of the Day) or window functions. Give them a problem, and once they solve it, the answer leads them to the next puzzle. A puzzle game, but one that paces you according to your understanding of a topic.

I wonder how many people might like learning like this, or perhaps might be frustrated when they can't solve something. Maybe this is a nice addition to something like a Stairway Series, giving readers a chance to practice skills. Do you think this is a good idea? Not a super hard, challenge the experts, but maybe a way to help those that are beginners or intermediate SQL people learn to code better.

Maybe some of you would like to build some small puzzles in T-SQL that we could link together? This might be a fun way to set up a T-SQL Advent calendar one year.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Featured Contents

Dynamic Pivot, Passing Temp Table Variables to Dynamic SQL

Jambu Krishnamurthy from SQLServerCentral.com

This example demonstrates how to perform a pivot using dynamic headers based on the row values of a table. The article also shows how to pass a temp table variable to a Dynamic SQL call. More »

Developing Metadata Design Patterns in BIML

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

You may have already experienced ETL Hell, where you have a large number of similar of SSIS tasks, and a small change, such as an alteration to the network topology, means that they all need to be altered with the correct connection details. Perhaps you should consider creating design patterns for all the standard components of integration tasks in BIML, and generating the SSIS packages from these? Amarendra walks you through the process. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - SQL Puzzle 2: Eight Queens

matthew.mcgiffen 73574 from SQLServerCentral Blogs

This puzzle was first proposed in 1848 by a composer of chess puzzles called Max Bezzel and has since spawned... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - SQL Server 2017 RC1 is Here

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral Blogs

And I’ve got it. Glenn Berry posted a a link to the MSDN blog and almost immediately a note that the... More »

Question of the Day

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When I create a table in an Azure SQL Data Warehouse, I can set the distribution of my data. What are the options I can use in the WITH (DISTRIBUTION = X) clause?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

What does @@IO_BUSY return?

Answer: The number of ticks since the last restart spent on IO operations

Explanation:

If you run

 select @@IO_BUSY

you get the number of ticks that have been spend on IO operations since the last server restart.

Ref: @@IO_BUSY - click here

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