Oh, no - Ambiguity strikes again in the 4 October quiz (1461)

The English language (or, rather, my use of it) strikes again! The 4 October quiz was one of those non-code, all-words quiz and it burned me/us again. The quiz question was: "Which of the following statements about PL/SQL records are correct?" Players complained about three (yes, three) of the choices. But I don't agree with all complaints. :-) Let's take a closer look.... 1. "A record contains an audio or video recording for storage in the Oracle database." As one player wrote: "I chose to read it as: 'A record may contain an audio or video recording...' Obviously, it is a column within the record that contains the multimedia experience, which means the record also does.' My response to this interpretation is: I disagree. That is, I suppose I understand why you might read the choice this way, but I do not believe it is a reasonable interpretation - I don't think there is ambiguity here. The question makes it clear that I am asking you to identify correct statements about records in general. It is true that a record might contain a "recording"/BLOB field. But it doesn't have to and the choice clearly (or at least, clearly enough, to my mind). This statement is not true for "PL/SQL records" as the question asks. Furthermore, it should be well understood that a PL/SQL record is not necessarily stored in the Oracle database (as a row in a table). So this statement was incorrect on several counts. I will not change scoring for this choice. Another player wrote about this choice: "I would have preferred this option to say 'A record ALWAYS contains a video/audio recording...' to remove the ambiguity." Yes, that would certainly be more explicit, but I also feel that it would "give too much away." 2. 'While it is possible to assign NULL to a record, it is not possible to check to see if every field in the record is null using the "IS NULL" operator.' Sigh. Yes, here we have an ambiguity that I cannot explain away. I wanted you to know or learn that you cannot use the IS NULL operator with the record variable itself. My decision to include "every field in the record," however, clearly invites you to interpret this choice as correct, in that you can check the contents of each field using IS NULL (or, if a field is a record, you could in turn use IS NULL on each of its fields, etc.). I should have made it clear that I wanted the IS NULL to be applied to the record. I did not, and so I will give all players credit for this choice, change the text to make it more explicit, and change all of your answers to indicate "correct" for this choice. 3. "You cannot check for equality between two records using the "=" operator. " One player suggested that this choice has the same ambiguity as #2. That is, you can use "=" to compare the values of individual fields of the record. I disagree with this interpretation. I believe it is quite clear that this choice asks you to decide if you can use the "=" operator with the records themselves, not their fields. I will not changes scores on this choice. So, sorry about that and on to the next quiz! Fortunately, it has code in it. :-) Cheers, Steven Feuerstein