OOW 2007: The Great Oracle SQL Quiz. We have a winner: Laurent Schneider

Just under an hour ago, we completed The Great Oracle SQL Quiz session at Oracle Open World. Around one hundred attendants managed to find their way to the session which took place right after the ‘biggest company party in the world’ and for some reason amidst dozens of sessions on JD Edwards. One of them was me – after having set up my laptop in the wrong room only to be evicted by the real speaker in that room just a few minutes prior to 8.30am, the designated start time of the Quiz.

Unfortunately for most of the audience, Laurent Schneider was among them.

Not only is he an Oracle ACE, writer of an excellent blog, Oracle Certified Master and author of an upcoming book on SQL (due late 2008). And Laurent did in fact manage to come of the quiz as a winner, beating four other finalists. Most importantly though, we had good fun!

The Quiz consisted of 15 questions on SQL and PL/SQL, most of which were illustrated with sometimes surprisingly slick demos (all is done in SQL*Plus). Laurent ended up scoring 11 out of 15, partly because he did not recognize Bruce Scott in a photograph from 1978 (the give away question that the quiz starts with) and because he failed to spot the PL/SQL fragment with the faulty declaratation (as did 95% of the audience):

declare 
  -- Answer A:
  a1 varchar2(10 byte);
  a2 date;
  a3 timestamp;
  a4 blob;
  --
  -- Answer B:
  b1 boolean;
  b2 natural;
  b3 positive;
  b4 binary_float;
  --
  -- ANSWER C:
  c1 string(200);
  c2 nvarchar2(100);
  c3 TIMESTAMP(3) WITH TIME ZONE;
  c4 interval day to second;
  --
  -- ANSWER D:
  d1 INTERVAL YEAR(3) TO MONTH;
  d2 sys_refcursor;
  d3 lob;
  d4 rowid;
begin
  null;
end;  

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