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I would like to note the passing of Sid Hollander, who briefly posted in this Puzzles for Programmers forum under the handle SidYuca. I recently came across the following obituary: https://yucalandia.com/2022/05/30/sid-hollander-yucatans-loss-heavens-gain/ In my view Sid's contributions to...

I'm not sure this merits a separate thread, but I would like to record my thoughts on the subject while they're still fresh in my mind. Recall from Chris Miller's calendar thread that there are five different ranges of x which correspond to 11 month, 337 day calendars that differ only in the...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_cattle_problem The cattle problem is unquestionably the most famous continued fraction problem, due both to its association with Archimedes and to the huge size of the solutions. The smallest solution has hundreds of thousands of digits. Although...

The "conquer the world" board game, Risk, decides the result of an attack on one territory from another by tossing dice. The attacker gets to toss as many as three dice, while the defender is limited to no more than two. To partly compensate for this advantage, the defender wins all ties. So...

In honor of Justin Verlander's sweep of the American League MVP and Cy Young Awards, here is a baseball question for your consideration. I apologize in advance for posting a problem that requires knowledge of the rules of baseball, but I can assure you that the knowledge required is minimal...

Pivot queries are a frequent topic in the Tek-tips Oracle forums. Thanks to taupirho's helpful tip from last year, we know how to write them using the sys_connect_by_path function, which is available in Oracle 10g R1 and above. See thread759-1492961 Starting in Oracle 11g, release 2, the...

I was reading that the Mayan "long count" calendar started on August 11, 3114 B.C. and will complete its 13th baktun on December 21, 2012. This represents a period of exactly 1,872,000 days (= 13*20*20*18*20). Unfortunately, Oracle date datatypes have a few problems and one outright bug which...

We are looking at evaluating and purchasing performance monitoring/tuning tools for Oracle. I know that Oracle licenses their own tools. What third party tools are available? We are a relatively new Oracle shop, so we don't know which products have the most to offer.