OK, so this afternoon I did an SQL test. I warned them that I haven't 
done any SQL for about 5 years and that I'm probably a bit rusty. OTOH, 
I was expecting it to be, like, *hard*? All they asked for was some 
pretty basic stuff like "find all pages that have been visited by 
Googlebot more than 5 times" and so forth. Pretty trivial SELECT statements.

[One required a union, several required grouping and aggregates. And I 
got tripped over by all the ones that want fuzzy text matching - I don't 
remember all that stuff any more.]

The last three completely stumped me. One wanted me to take some data 
from one table and insert it into another one. I know how that's done, I 
just don't remember the command syntax off the top of my head. Another 
wanted me to use "cursors" - something I've never ever done before. I 
don't even know what one *is*.

The final one was quite an interesting problem though... I'm wondering 
if anybody has a solution.

Given a table containing all the page hits, count how many visits the 
website has had. (Two hits are the same "visit" if they're the same 
username and happen within 10 minutes of each other.)

I sat for ages puzzling over this one. I can't figure out how the heck 
to do it... any pointers?

PS. Apparently "I see plenty of people who claim to know SQL who do 
worse than you did. You're really underselling yourself, Andrew. I 
wasn't even expecting you to ATTEMPT those last few..."

PPS. First person who says 0x3A28213A gets a slap!

PPPS. http://www.xkcd.com/138/

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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