this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Programming

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Solve mysteries through SQL.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 days ago (1 children)
SELECT few FROM people WHERE gets_joke = 1
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

What would my few say?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m a rebel. I write all my sql in lowercase

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah we have IDEs to color keywords for us these days. Caps is just extra work

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Capital letters are bigger, thus they use bigger bytes and use too much disk space and memory. That's why most programming languages use lowercase, and why the most common loop variable is i.

[–] anzo 2 points 2 days ago

And why untyped languages are better at managing memory too. Less characters ftw!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

If you're new to SQL there's interactive Select Star SQL tutorial. And there's another detective — SQL Murder Mystery

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

I know what I'm doing at work today

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I have some time to kill before having to run some errands. I've started with the first one and it's pretty fun!

Said "fuck yeah" a couple times to myself when I got the answer right. I've not used SQL before but I've got a decent grasp (as in I get the basics) on programming languages so it's somewhat intuitive to me

Thanks for the links!! I look forward to continuing when I get back

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

My gosh, these are incredible. Thank you for sharing them. I cried at Select Star; that is legitimate art.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I tried to hit F5 to run a query and it refreshed the page lol

edit: I'm also slightly annoyed that the table names are a mix of singular and plural

[–] nebeker 3 points 5 days ago

That totally threw me off. “Literally unplayable,” as they say.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

seems like there's an issue with case 3. the person_id and from surveillance_records doesn't match up with the person_id in the hotel_checkins table when joined on hotel-checkin_id

[–] Redkey 1 points 14 hours ago

Yep, surveillance_records.person_id is the same as surveillance_records.id, which is incorrect. I looked at the Github repo and there's already a report for it.

What I don't understand (and apparently this is my problem, not a bug) is how we're supposed to narrow the list down to three suspects in the next-to-last step, as the "Case Solved" text describes (Yeah, I cheated). The interviews with the two witnesses give a partial hotel name and a check-in date, but that returns dozens of results. The ending messsge congratulates us for reducing that list by using the surveillance records in some way, but I can't see how. The only other detail I have is "The guy looked nervous", which doesn't seem to have any connection with the surveillance records.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

This seems like it was made specifically for me and my interests.