Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 04/16/07 21:41

(tizmagik@gmail.com) writes:
> Erland: Why would it matter if it's a class assignment or not? Is not
> the purpose of a Usenet group to share and learn from each other?

But Usenet is not the best place to learn everything. If you have some
experience in the field of SQL programming, I can assume that you can
understand the solution I post to some extend and learn from it.

But if you are a student who is not interested in doing his homework?

I remember way back when, when I was a student myself, and also worked as
an assistant teacher in programming. Back in those days, the assignments
were made on paper, and when the student was approved for this week's
exercise I would give him a paper with the "ideal" solution. Sometimes
it happened that students arrived to the classroom with this ideal
solution, in which case I told them not do to it again. And I did not
approve them for that assignment. (It was permitted to miss one or two.)

One year I had a group in Programming 2, an optional class which taught
programming structures. I had one guy who consistently arrived with
the ideal solution, and I knew that his girlfriend was taking the same
class. I figured that at this stage, he should know better than cheating,
so I did not say anything. I approved his "solutions" without a comment
and let him go. But these assignments were not all - there was a written
exam as well. And when the results came up, his girl-friend was there.
But, not surprisingly, he wasn't. He had just copied the ideal solutions,
but he hadn't learnt anything.

> Thank you Ed, seems to be what I'm looking for, it's interesting, I
> never even though of setting up a Count, but now that I look at it,
> it's hard to imagine any other way of doing it.

Sorry for the incorrect solution, but there is a standard recommendation
for this type of questions, and that is that you post:

o CREATE TABLE statements for your table(s).
o INSERT statements with sample data.
o The desireed output, given the sample.

That makes it easy to copy and paste to develop a tested solution. Without
that, most people here tend to just type something up, and sometimes
there are errors.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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