BETWEEN

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BETWEEN

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Jeff Deluca

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 6:32 AM

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Whereas I can agree with the wording change from 'same' to 'identical', I thought it was obvious what this question was testing.

Good question.

Thanks

-Jeff

Post #512056

jim.powers

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 8:06 AM

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I felt like the question was a good question and was worded mostly well. Based on the feedback already posted, the only word I would have changed or removed was consistently. The way this was used would imply that the statements would be run multiple times on the same data set. In that case, the answer would be YES, which is what most folks were falling in to.

By removing the word consistently, I believe the question would have been completely correctly worded.

Despite my opinion here, I believe this was a good question as it was testing knowledge of the BETWEEN function.

Post #512143

GSquared

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 9:09 AM

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I thought the question was clear enough. Good test of how Between works, which is all it seemed to me to be about.

I think some may have overthought it. That probably comes from some of the other questions, which have been "tricky".

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Post #512201

Harit Gohel

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 9:42 AM

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I agreed with Mark...Question was not to test ENGLISH it was to test the BETWEEN (T-SQL context)..... Hehe

Post #512238

Q -631159

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 10:03 AM

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On my first read I thought that it was asking for consitancy on each execution, but when I thought about the select statements and the order of the between values, it was more clear that the author wanted to compare the result sets. Badly worded, but good example of how between works.

Q

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Post #512264

Anipaul

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 10:07 AM

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why complain folks, question is good, only you have to read it long time to understand.....:)

Post #512275

Marius Els

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 10:17 AM

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I stepped into the answer to quickly as well.... unfortunately selecting yes, as my "interpretation" also (like many others) was running the query on select #1 and #2 multiple times, where my focus should have been on "this a between test" and not "what if the selects are run multiple times".....

good question, if you think a bit longer about it

well better luck next time :D

Post #512284

Matt Miller (#4)

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 12:57 PM

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Thanks for the feedback folks... Some good comments. I will try to incorporate them next time.

I did have a bit of a hard time wording it. The goal was to allow you to run the entire script however many times and compare the results from #1 to #2 and not different generations of #1 to each other and #2 to each other. That didn't always come out, so it could have been worded better.

The "consistently" was inserted later to deal with the "1 in a billion" chance that a run of the SELECT...INTO happened to generate a quarter million values all outside of the 3-5 range....which would be the exception where #1 and #2 WOULD in fact be the same. Not likely, but possible.

I do like Philip's rewrite - but it still doesn't quite get to to heart of comparing #1 to #2. You'd have to reword as:

"Would statement #1 always generate a result identical to #2's ?" (answer - no, not always, but once in a blue blue moon, perhaps)

Anyway - as said before - I will take these into account next time..:)

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Post #512404

Mohamed-401375

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 1:06 PM

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Good question, does a good job of testing knowledge about BETWEEN,
but bad english.

I think the questioner needs to know the difference between 'consistent' and 'same as'.

Consistent means same result everytime and each time

'same as' - statement #1 's result = statement #2 's result

Post #512411

chajere

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 1:30 PM

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I think that this question was correctly formed.:D

Post #512441

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