24 September quiz prompts warnings from players (1403)

The 24 September quiz tested your awareness of string-indexed collections, and how you can use these to effectively change the sort order of the data in one's collection. Two players wrote regarding this quiz as follows: Daniel: "The solutions only work in very specific scenarios. If the text value was to be repeated, ie: 2 Michael Jordan entries, then only one of them would be displayed. So I don't think that solutions provided, other than the Insert/Select are very safe when dealing with large data sets." Patrick: "I would suggest to add a big warning to one of the answers of the question of 24-Sep. I know that the answer creating a table on the fly, inserting the data and selecting from there is syntactically correct, but I think it should almost never be used that way in a real program. The simple reason for that is that it's not multi user/session ready. If another use is currently using that function, a second user would get an error message when he tries to create the same table on the fly. Especially in web applications, most sessions are sharing the same database runtime users. I wanted to point that out, because many novice developers might take your examples as "facts" how a more complicated sort could be solved, but I think that answer needs a big warning that this is just a theoretical solution and should NOT be used in real world applications." Both Daniel and Patrick make good points (I have changed one of the answers to include Patrick's warning, in fact) and also make me realize how important it is for players to recognize that these quizzes will almost always be focused on particular features of the PL/SQL language. These features are inevitably presented outside the context of "real world" application development, in which many factors come into play. I will try to be better about including warnings in answers, when a theoretically correct solution could raise practical, real-world issues - but I also rely on and trust you, our devoted players, to let me know whenever you have a concern. Also, I am looking into how I can also present best practice oriented topics in the daily quiz in an unamibguous fashion ("best practices" inherently have a good does of subjectivity associated with them). If you have any thoughts about how I might do that, or specific ideas for quizzes, don't hesitate to let me know. I also plan to reorganize the blog so that it can be directly linked to the quizzes, allowing discussion of features and application of those features to be more visible to everyone playing the quiz. Cheers, Steven