Interview Question of the Week #011 – Script to Convert List to Table and Table to List

Now today’s interview question is really more of daily routine task for many of the developer. 11 years ago, when I went to my very first interview call. My interview was scheduled at 6 PM in one of the very well known corporation. The corporation was known for its first initiatives for social media. When I reached there at 6 PM there were many candidates and we all got the same task to complete. The task was as follows:

Task 1) Write a script to convert a list to a table

Task 2) Write a script to convert the table to a list

We all had two hours of time to complete the task. There were quite a few developers who had completed the task, but I had failed the interview as I was not good with SQL Scripting. After I return from the interview, I had decided to write scripts for my personal learning. I did not want to fail the interviews in the future if I was ever going to get that task.

Here are the answers for both the tasks.

Answer for Task 1: SQL SERVER – Creating Comma Separate Values List from Table – UDF – SP

Answer for Task 2: SQL SERVER – UDF – Function to Convert List to Table

The irony of the life is that I never got the same task again in future. Here is the question back to you – can you guess the name of the organization which was based out of California and one of the early social media giants?

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