It's Advent - the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas - and if your are a programmer complete daily coding challenges with the Advent of Code, the Advent of Perl, the Advent of Java, Javascriptmas, etc. Now we have the Advent of SQL too with 24 SQL challenges to complete before Christmas!

This Advent requires signing up with an email address, because from the 1st of December until the day of Christmas Eve you'll be getting a daily challenge emailed to you. However, after you sign up you can then sign in into the site to get access to the past challenges which is handy if you have signed up later on.

All the challenges are Christmas-themed and fun and along with them you get a database dump with all the data you'll need to complete them and instructions on how to use it.

As such, Day 1 commenced with the challenge called "Santa's Gift List Parser". The Christmas theme of the challenge goes as:

Santa's workshop is modernizing! Gone are the days of paper wish lists and manual sorting. The elves have implemented a new digital system to handle the millions of Christmas wishes they receive. However, Santa needs a way to quickly understand what each child wants and how to optimize workshop operations.

The task to complete is :

Create a report that helps Santa and the elves understand:

• Each child's primary and backup gift choices
• Their color preferences
• How complex each gift is to make
• Which workshop department should handle the creation

A sample schema with a few data is included which shows how the structure of the data is and what kind of answer the challenge expects. Note, this sample data is not the database dump that you're actually be going to work on. To get it click on "Download challenge data".

At this screen you'll be presented with instructions on how to download it and subsequently load it into a local database (PostgreSQL used in the examples) on your workstation or without installing anything, navigating to DBfiddle by the predefined link so that you get everything set up inside your browser.

All the challenges apply that template and workflow. After you solve the puzzle you submit your answers through the challenges' Form. 

In common with the other Advent challenges, there's the chance to ask for help or compare notes with others - in this case a subReddit, r/adventofsql, a link to which is on the Home Page.

Since the Advent began on December 1st and now it's the 12th today going, there's already been 11 challenges out.
These include tasks as turning perfectly good Christmas wishes which were scrambled into a jumble of integers back to human readable letters, writing a SQL query that can search through all XML schema versions to find the most beloved dishes from the busiest celebrations, finding the elf with the most (max) and least (min) years of experience, and writing recursive SQL to find out how many managers the most over-managed employee has (levels deep).

It's obvious that the challenges as the days pass increase in difficulty. For instance, recursive SQL is the challenge of current day 9. Imagine what lies ahead! But why not just imagining but actually doing it? Then go ahead and register, it's free and the perfect opportunity for people like developers and data analysts to hone their skills!

More Information

Advent of SQL

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