17 October 2010

PL/SQL Challenge 1.7: beta test and amazing new features

We plan to upgrade the PL/SQL Challenge website to version 1.7 on October 23. This version has many new and wonderful features, including:

* Home page changes: we now show you a random selection of past quizzes that you can visit for a quick PL/SQL refresher, plus a display of players who deserve congratulations for winning an award, high ranking, frequent play, etc.

* Past Quizzes: you can now search through all past quizzes by topic, difficulty or date, and then drill down to see a new, more detailed description of the quiz and your results.

* Interactive Rankings: built on top of the APEX4 Interactive Reports feature, you can now see rankings by player, country, organization and company (for a given period: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, lifetime). You can build your own custom reports. We believe that many of the requests we have received from players for better rankings information will be satisfied by this feature (for example: if you want to keep track of and rank players in the same company, simply choose one of the Rankings by Player reports and then filter by company!).

* Take the Quiz page: each quiz now includes a "No choices are correct" option at the bottom of the page. You must check at least one of the choices before you can submit your answer.

Before we upgrade on the 23rd, we'd like to get feedback from you on the features, the data points in the rankings reports, etc. So we have set up http://beta.plsqlchallenge.com for beta testing from October 18 to October 22. Please visit and go exploring. Tell us what you think needs change or improvement.

For the beta test, you can log in with your regular email and password. The quizzes are from a previous week; they are not the same as those on the production site. All past quiz activity should be the same as on the production site.

Warm regards and thanks for your help in testing,
Steven Feuerstein

Known Issues

* Links to PDF documents, zip files and some sponsor images are not working. These will be up and running in the production site.

* Bad formatting on several pages when using Internet Explorer: we are working on these.

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