07 July 2010

Plans for the next week here at PL/SQL Challenge Headquarters

The first full quarter (Q2) of the PL/SQL Challenge ended on 30 June. We have started the next quarter (Q3), but we still need to hold the championship playoff for Q2. We plan to hold this playoff in about one week.

As you are probably aware, the PL/SQL Challenge website is very new; we are still building out the functionality of the website and, in fact, the playoff functionality is not yet on the website.

So this weekend (and we have to upgrade over the weekend, when you are not playing - a very powerful reason, by the way, to not extend the daily quiz seven days a week), we will be upgrading the PL/SQL Challenge to version 1.4. The main focus of this release is to implement the new logic and pages needed for the championship playoff. There will also be other significant new features, such as automated reminders (with the expected opt-out checkboxes on the profile page).

Once we complete the upgrade this weekend and are confident that we can hold the playoff next week, we will do the following:
  1. Identify all players who are elgible to participate in the playoff.
  2. Decide on the date and time for the playoff.
  3. Publish all of this information on Monday, 10 July, along with an explanation of the playoff process.
We will have players from all over the world participating in the playoff, and the playoff must be held at the same time for everyone. It is, therefore, quite possible that some of you will have to play at a very inconvenient time for you. If you cannot play at the published date and time, you cannot participate in the playoff. We apologize for this, but we don't see any way around it.

Finally, I would like to set expectations appropriately. We are moving very quickly with the PL/SQL Challenge initiative and, contrary to what you might believe, we do not have a big team of full-time developers on this project (yet :-) ). So it is possible that even though we test thoroughly this weekend, when the playoff starts next week we run into a problem and all players are not able to complete the playoff.

That would be very unfortunate, but it will not be the end of the world. If we do encounter such problems, we will simply re-schedule the playoff. Have no fear, your answers and your ranking from Q2 will not change.

So....wish us the best for this weekend and look forward to some big announcements on Monday!

2 comments:

  1. Will you have a minimum attendance requirement for the playoff? For example, if all but one or two people are unable to play due to other commitments, would you still award the winner?

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  2. Good point, Jeff. We will set a minimum. If lots and lots of people say "impossible," we will change the date/time.

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