20 August 2010

Read Those Assumptions!

I just received this note from a player:
Which of the choices, when executed, results in the display of the phrase "Delete occurred!" (without the double quotes) just once? ... Again, this should have been none because dbms_output does not run if server output is not set. The question did not state that you run the question from query analyzer where server output has been set. I think we are beginning to have too many ambiguities with this challenge stuff. It will be nice to be more explicit as to the context in which the question is being asked.
Actually, I am feeling rather good these days that we have been avoiding very problematic ambiguities in our quizzes. Certainly the number of outright mistakes has plummeted to zero of late.

Now, as I hope many of you know, every single day before you can take the quiz, we show you these assumptions:

Assumptions

Unless otherwise noted in the text of the quiz question, you should assume the following:
  • The database version is 10.2 (Oracle Database 10g Release 2); the edition is Enterprise Edition; the database character set is an 8-bit character set; and the national character set is AL16UTF16.
  • The PL/SQL compiler optimization level controlled through the plsql_optimize_level initialization parameter is set to 2, and all PL/SQL code is compiled without debug information.
  • The session and the environment in which the quiz code executes has enabled output from DBMS_OUTPUT (with an unlimited buffer size), and can reference only those datatypes, programs and database objects defined in the context of the quiz or are available in a default installation of the Oracle instance.
I can understand why they might become invisible after a while, but I urge you to re-read them now and then, both to refresh your memory and to see if anything new has been added.

Regards, Steven

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