Infobright Blog

Here's our latest community challenge.  This will run until Jan 5th, 2009 at noon. 

Set-up:

At Infobright High School, the student information system (Big SIS), keeps track of grades for attending students. The dean is preparing his annual choice for valedictorian and wants the honor to go to the top student in each major.

The Goal:

You've been asked to provide a list of all majors offered in the school and the student with the highest grade point average (GPA) for each major and show their GPA but do not include a student if their GPA is less than 3. He wants this list sorted by major name. This is an ad-hoc report so formatting, titles, headings are not needed.

Assumptions:

Basically none.  At least no restrictions on your assumptions.  Assume any tool you want, any technique, any (automated) pre-processing.  The only thing to keep in mind is that this is for a large volume load scenario in a data warehouse so row-by-row, cursor-based processing is discouraged.  (The procedural logic is easy – just way too slow.  Use SQL.  And as few statements as possible – preferably one.) Also, you must test your solution using ICE.  Given:

There are 3 tables, students, student_grades and majors. There can be zero to many student grades per student.  

Download the sample data necessary to solve the challenge

One lucky person will receive an Blue Apple Nano for coming up with the solution first!  The challenge is open from December 9th, through to Monday January 5th at 12:00PM EST.  The winner will be announced on Tuesday January 6th at 12:00PM EST.  Judging will be handled by our DW Specialists - David Lutz, Carl Gelbart, John Kemp, and Victoria Eastwood.

How to Participate:

Draft up your response Set the subject to 'Community Challenge #2 - Response" Send it to me at the following address:   mark dot windrim at infobright dot org Think of how hip you'll be with your new iPod Nano, should you win... Any questions?  Please email me directly!    

Sadly, Infobright employees, family, and partners (not in the literal sense), aren't able to participate in this contest.  We'd love your solutions just the same though!