August 17, 2012 at 6:53 am
Ouch, this one made my brain hurt.
Impossible to answer, but it did make me think.
August 17, 2012 at 7:12 am
I agree with Hugo. I thought of a couple of ways this could be done in my head before answering first, but didn't bother trying to research any other ways.. took an educated stab at an answer, but guessed wrongly. Knowing the answer now doesn't really serve me much use either going forward. Fair play to the author though for coming up with this and their research; it's just one that I won't remember for too long 🙂
August 17, 2012 at 7:16 am
It was a thinking question. I never even counted how many ways a variable could be set to a value. Having to leave out the basic SET (I don't count SET in the UPDATE statement the same way as it is required) and SELECT statements, how many ways are there? Yes, you could count some multiple times, but if you think about it, it's still the same (a duplicate, if you will).
August 17, 2012 at 8:16 am
Koen Verbeeck (8/17/2012)
Great question, but way too difficult for a Friday 🙂
+1
Kept on coming back to it through the day - still got it wrong!
-------------------------------Posting Data Etiquette - Jeff Moden [/url]Smart way to ask a question
There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand (the world). There is no such thing as a dumb question. ― Carl Sagan
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August 17, 2012 at 8:37 am
August 17, 2012 at 10:05 am
I had no idea what the correct answer was and still don't.
August 17, 2012 at 11:33 am
Cliff Jones (8/17/2012)
I had no idea what the correct answer was and still don't.
There is no correct answer. Several terms in the question were vague enough to ensure that. It's a great concept to think about and discuss, but I don't think a QotD served well as the mechanism to introduce it.
August 17, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Hugo - I appreciate your comments, and probably agree with most of them. 🙂
If this generated some thinking, some head scratching, some friendly debate, and even a little education, I think the QoD goal has been met, even if not delivered quite perfectly.
And maybe it helps us remember that this is a pretty complex product we program & support. And that we are not deficient at our job if we do not have every detail memorized.
But Yes, I am the person that occasionally will "read BOL entirely" just for curiosity, and to maybe discover something new and interesting and maybe even useful! [And yes, I also am the rare person who reads farther than the first page of Google results.]
August 17, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Hugo Kornelis (8/17/2012)
I appreciate the amount of research that went into this question and I think it has a good educational value, but I don't think a QotD is the right form for this education - at least not a QotD in this specific form.
Got to this late today. So thanks to Hugo for saving me having to respond with that thought. However, my response would not have been so detailed or well written. I appreciate the effort of OP, but looked at the question after a long day and thought, "Who cares?" But that says more about me and my day than the question. 🙂
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August 18, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Cliff Jones (8/17/2012)
I had no idea what the correct answer was and still don't.
+1
...One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important.... Bertrand Russell
August 20, 2012 at 3:02 am
I got it right - but my list of possibilities was different from the questioner's 🙂
August 20, 2012 at 3:36 am
Interesting question, and my answer were pure guesswork. I would argue with the first kind, as arguments to function calls or procedures. Although they can be varied, I don't regard an input argument to be a variable. Output variables are a special kind, but ARE assignments to variables outside the SP.
But I will side with Hugo in regarding this as a question with no clearly defined answer.
Thanks for a QoT that sparked a good discussion.
August 20, 2012 at 10:05 am
Wow, that was a tough one. I think I could have researched all day and still missed this one. At least it started some good discussion.
August 21, 2012 at 10:21 am
GPO (8/18/2012)
Cliff Jones (8/17/2012)
I had no idea what the correct answer was and still don't.+1
+1, with a lucky guess
August 22, 2012 at 8:24 am
lucky guess. I could only think of 3...
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