SQLAuthority News – T-SQL Challenges and Hints and Suggestions

Those who read my blog are for sure know my very good friend Jacob Sebastian. He is SQL Server MVP and founder of wonderful site T-SQL Challenges. No matter how expert we are, challenges are made to make us think and try to go to next level. There are certain people who writes always challenging code, however there are many who are yet not expert but the passion of T-SQL is on them. Jacob has many wonderful ideas and T-SQL challenge is his contribution to community, where he helps community to think, help them to mentor and help them to become one better coder.

I always refer T-SQL Challenge site to someone who are eager to learn T-SQL. However, the common response I get from developers I get is they are not sure where to start from. I have decided to now help everyone who wants to solve the T-SQL Challenge. Every month, I will blog post where I will discuss the challenge and will provide few hints of the solution. I hope this will help developers to go break the ice with challenge and get going with it.

TSQL Beginners Challenge 12 – Find the available registration dates

This challenge involves finding available registration dates based on event schedules and registration data.

Hint:

• Get Date Time in Any Format – UDF – User Defined Functions
• Few Useful DateTime Functions to Find Specific Dates

TSQL Beginners Challenge 13 – Validate GUID values and perform a horizontal and vertical count of characters

The challenge involves validating the GUID values and perform horizontal and vertical count of the characters “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, A, B, C, D, E”.

Hint:

• User Defined Function to Extract Only Numbers From String
• GUID vs INT

TSQL Challenge 35 – Find the total number of ‘Full Attendees’ in each 24 HOP Session

The recent 24-hours-of-pass or more widely known as #24HOP on twitter and other social media was one of the most exciting SQL Server events that happened recently. For this challenge, we created some (fake) attendance data for this event. Your task is to count the number of attendees who watched the complete presentation of each speaker.

Hint:

• Datetime Function TODATETIMEOFFSET Example
• Datetime Function SWITCHOFFSET Example

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)