Job Application Test from Hell

[Brady Kelly]

How do you ensure the required ordering?

[wolfbinary]

I was thinking the same thing.

That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_

[Brady Kelly]

It was by email, and solvable. Durban and Cape Town contacts are sorted by name in the requirement. All contacts are sorted only by Region in the input data.

[PIEBALDconsult]

The correct answer is: "With which database system?" P.S. With Access/Jet via ADO.net:

select * from RegionContact order by len(Region) mod 2,Region,Contact

Region Contact

---

Durban John
Durban Mary
Johannesburg Frank
Cape Town Anna
Cape Town Fred
Cape Town Joe

6 records affected.

modified on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 4:03 PM

[AspDotNetDev]

So here's my guess as to what the sort order is:

• Sort by region, ascending, but making the first item group (by region) in that sort the last item. Do not consider whitespace in the sort order.
• When two or more of the regions are the same (again, excluding whitespace), sort by contact ascending.

Rather than follow those zany rules, I'd probably just do this:

SELECT 'Durban' AS Region, 'John' AS Contact
UNION
SELECT 'Durban', 'Mary'
UNION
SELECT 'Johannesburg', 'Frank'
UNION
SELECT 'Cape Town', 'Anna'
UNION
SELECT 'CapeTown', 'Fred'
UNION
SELECT 'Cape Town', 'Joe'

[Forum Guidelines]

[Andy Brummer]

I hope the question was an attempt to see if you would back away from the keyboard and start asking questions. If not, they deserve all the gung ho developers that they get.

Curvature of the Mind

[Single Step Debugger]

We can’t use “order by” with the union but we could unite every single row separately – ugly but works.

The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

[Single Step Debugger]

select * from (select * from dbo.RegionTable RT
where RT.Region = 'Durban' order by RT.Contact asc) as union1
union all
select * from (select * from dbo.RegionTable RT
where RT.Region = 'Johannesburg' order by RT.Contact asc) as union3
union all
select * from (select * from dbo.RegionTable RT
where RT.Region = 'Cape Town' order by RT.Contact asc) as union2

The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

[Chris Meech]

This will fail, since one of the regions has been entered as "CapeTown" instead of "Cape Town". :)

Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra] posting about Crystal Reports here is like discussing gay marriage on a catholic church’s website.[Nishant Sivakumar]

[Chris Meech]

The only obvious ordering sequence is the number of capitalized letters in Region, followed by the Region, followed by the Contact. :)

Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra] posting about Crystal Reports here is like discussing gay marriage on a catholic church’s website.[Nishant Sivakumar]

[Christian Graus]

OK, so it's sorted by two fields we can't see ( region and email address ) ?

Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

[Tomz_KV]

select region, contact from ( select region, contact, case when region='Johannesburg' then 5 when region='Durban' then 1 else 10 end as Expr1 from TableName ) as Tbl order by Expr1, Contact

TOMZ_KV

[Single Step Debugger]

No it won’t because the missing interval is due to the level of Brady’s BAC rather than the original task conditions. :)

The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

[Brady Kelly]

Haha, no, I suspect it was a typo on their part, but I treated it like I would a landmine. :~

[Brady Kelly]

The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions, unless TOP or FOR XML is also specified. :) Here is mine, a little more general but very much the same:

select first.*, 0 outerSeq from (select top(select COUNT(*) from Contacts) * from Contacts where Region >= 'Durban' order by Region, Contact) first
union all
select second.*, 1 outerSeq from (select top (select COUNT(*) from Contacts) * from Contacts where Region < 'Durban' order by Region, Contact) as second
order by outerSeq

[PIEBALDconsult]

What? Hold a protest rally outside the Pentagon? :confused:

[Single Step Debugger]

This is shorter than my solution, I like it!:thumbsup:

The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

[Pete OHanlon]

Well, one way to do this would be to do something along the lines of:

SELECT Region, Contact FROM WhatACrappyTest
ORDER BY SUBSTRING(Region,2,1) DESC, Contact ASC

This works based on the fact that the second character is ordered descending, and the contact orders ascending. This even takes the fact that your have CapeTown and Cape Town in the Region column. Obviously, the interviewer should be challenged on the validity of this question.

I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be

Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

[AspDotNetDev]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

Cape Town

According to the OP, one of those should be without a space.

[Forum Guidelines]

[Christian Graus]

If I was the interviewer, I'd have hired you based on that answer.

Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.