14 October 2010

Update regarding the Q3 Championship Playoff

On Tuesday, October 12, at 10 AM UTC, over 70 developers eagerly visited playoff.plsqlchallenge.com and pressed the buttons that would start their taking of the playoff.

Unfortunately, we encountered several technical difficulties, most likely related to the virtually simultaneous retrieval of quiz images and submission of answers by so many players.

While over 60 players were able to complete at least eight of the ten quizzes, many others could not move past the first couple of quizzes. So with great regret, we had to cancel the playoff and not use the results to pick our quarterly champions.

We are going to fix the bugs and run a live test of the playoff site before we re-schedule the playoff. It is very likely that we will hold playoff in November.

The playoff participants have been wonderful, both in their determination to work through the bugs to take the quizzes and also in their generosity of spirit. No one got really mad at me, which was good, because I was already plenty disgusted with myself for letting this happen.

We will make the results from the quiz available to participants next week, so they can see how they did. When we have fixed our bugs and are certain the playoff site will not implode, we will announce the date and time of the playoff.

In the meantime, the daily quiz continues - and I will very soon make an announcement regarding the upgrade of the PL/SQL Challenge site to version 1.7 and APEX4. You will, I promise, be delighted with the new features in this release.

Warm regards,
Steven

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