Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 – Solving a Sudoku using Recursive Subquery Factoring

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 introduces a new feature called Recursive Subquery Factoring. My collegue Lucas sees it as a substitute for Connect By based hierarchical querying, Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 – new style hierarchical querying using Recursive Subquery Factoring. When I first was thinking about a pratical use for this feature I couldn’t come up with anything, but on second thought:: solving Sudokus!

Say you have a sudoku like:

 To solve this sudoku you first have to transforms this to a single string by appending all rows together:

Past this string into a Recursive Subquery, run it and you get a new string with your solved sudoku:

with x( s, ind ) as
( select sud, instr( sud, ' ' )
  from ( select '53  7    6  195    98    6 8   6   34  8 3  17   2   6 6    28    419  5    8  79' sud from dual )
  union all
  select substr( s, 1, ind - 1 ) || z || substr( s, ind + 1 )
       , instr( s, ' ', ind + 1 )
  from x
     , ( select to_char( rownum ) z
         from dual
         connect by rownum <= 9
       ) z
  where ind > 0
  and not exists ( select null
                   from ( select rownum lp
                          from dual
                          connect by rownum <= 9
                        )
                   where z = substr( s, trunc( ( ind - 1 ) / 9 ) * 9 + lp, 1 )
                   or    z = substr( s, mod( ind - 1, 9 ) - 8 + lp * 9, 1 )
                   or    z = substr( s, mod( trunc( ( ind - 1 ) / 3 ), 3 ) * 3
                                      + trunc( ( ind - 1 ) / 27 ) * 27 + lp
                                      + trunc( ( lp - 1 ) / 3 ) * 6
                                   , 1 )
                 )
)
select s
from x
where ind = 0
/

This string can be transformed back to a nice display of the solution

So with Recursive Subquery Factoring you can solve your sudokus in 1 statement wich does fit on your screen, not something like in Solving a Sudoku with 1 SQL-statement: the Model-clause

Anton