Comments on: 9 SQL Parameters: Load-Lookup Love Letter

By: administrator

administrator — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:14:02 +0000

Good start, but I should have told you that PS_PERS_NID stores the NATIONAL_ID without special characters. That would have simplified your where clause. Sorry.

By: administrator

administrator — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:10:56 +0000

Part of the brain teaser is to think about what can go wrong in data entry. You’ve identified the same ones I did; a single wrong character (digit, letter, or special), transposed digits (54 instead of 45). The only other case I’d suggest is a missing digit; eight characters instead of nine. Also, I assumed that there would not be dashes.

By: Sundeep Kumar

Sundeep Kumar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:42:07 +0000

If the scenario is having special characters in the SSN then
Let $BLANK = ”
Let $SSN_NOSPLCHR = TRANSLATE($SSN,’./-,’,$BLANK)
Do Validate-SSN

Begin-Procedure Validate-SSN
Let $FOUND = ‘N’
Begin-SELECT
NATIONAL_ID
Let $FOUND = ‘Y’
FROM PS_PERS_NID
WHERE REPLACE(TRANSLATE(NATIONAL_ID,’./-,’,’ ‘),’ ‘,”) = $SSN_NOSPLCHR
End-SELECT

IF $FOUND = ‘N’
Show $SSN ‘ Does Not exist in the Database
End-IF

End-Procedure Validate-SSN

By: Sundeep Kumar

Sundeep Kumar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:32:38 +0000

I need a clarification regarding this brain teaser
When you say typo with the SSN in the file did you mean having some special characters, spaces in the SSN. Or is it some thing like the digits in the SSN being jumbled like 123-45-6789 123-54-6789

By: administrator

administrator — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:36:48 +0000

There are object-oriented databases and multidimensional databases. They might not use SQL. There is Open Insight from Revelation Software, which I think of as a hierarchical database. It doesn’t use SQL. There may be other relational databases that don’t use SQL. SQR for DDO uses DDO instead of SQL. I’ve heard of all these things, but I’ve worked almost exclusively with Oracle (therefore SQL) for the past 11 years. Can anyone else comment?

By: SQL Tutorials

SQL Tutorials — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:52:12 +0000

You know, the thing about SQL is, that there is virtually nothing that can replace it.

Does anyone know if a substitute exists for sql? I mean besides MS SQL and Oracle and all that jazz. Thanks.

By: administrator

administrator — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:15:51 +0000

Social Security numbers (SSN) can start with almost any three digit combination except 666 – seriously. There are still some three digit prefixes that haven’t been used, but they’re going fast, so it is unwise to try to validate them. But the brain teaser is not about validating SSN; it is about fixing typos. There’s a basic assumption here, that we have a relatively small group of people (employees of one organization) with a random scattering of SSNs. The incoming SSNs are also not random; they should match the ones in our table. I’m also making an assumption about typos.

By: Bob Josephson

Bob Josephson — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:04:47 +0000

For the brain teaser, I went to Wikipedia and looked up “social security number”. It looks from there that there are not many opportunities for SSN validation. There’s no checksum, and any combination of digits is potentially valid. Other than checking for numeric-only characters and the 3-2-4 digit pattern, what can we do?

(I wonder what SSNs would look like if they had been invented today instead of in the 1930s.)