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Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

sqlpd.com

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Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#51
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is randomised, nothing is based real data. It's auto generated from popular first names, last names, changing patterns and random years or numbers attached at the end. Domains are real, but randomised as well.

It's kinda risky in my opinion. I just checked a few of the addresses (mostly the one's without any numbers at the end), some of them do actually belong to real people.

I was aiming for a feeling of dealing with real data (even though it's not). Changing the email domain names to fictitious ones will solve this, but I think would undermine the feeling of real-ness.

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#52

Cool concept but the license seems kind of weird to me. 20 bucks for six months? Will anything change in that time? You might want to add a bit of info on what the license gets you.

Thanks! The game is still in development. It covers SELECT, DISTINCT, FROM (with one table), ORDER BY, LIMIT in the free part. After buying a license, WHERE, IN, BETWEEN, AND and OR are also covered. Check out the guide tab in the game - it covers everything supported so far. I plan on adding support for GROUP BY, aggregate functions, HAVING, aliases, JOINING multiple tables, and some more stuff with more complex cas…

Cool game, but I think pricing maybe a value issue. Might make more $$ if you just had a donation button, and some ads and maybe an option to upgrade to remove ads/donation nags. Plus you'd get a lot more word of mouth, and maybe add some social sharing of 'accomplishments' etc...

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#53
post #8

Worth considering capturing the keyboard input. I instinctively hit "delete" partway through to delete something I had clicked on and it took me back to HN and I lost my progress.

do you ever actually use backspace to go back a page? If not, turn it off in your browser settings, since you'll only ever use it accidentally anyway. (And what's more, you'll only ever use it accidentally while you're trying to edit text you've input.)

to me backspace going back a page = a sense of frustration. better to turn it off in the browser, so I did so.

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#56

I can only solve the first one. I click submit, get a "Solved" stamp, and it prompts me with the same problem again.

The first two are cases of selecting the whole table. Since it's (completely) randomised, there is a chance of getting the same table twice. I didn't account for that :-P If you solve it again, you'll get a new case following that.

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#58
post #25

This is a cool idea but if you accidentally hit the back button or refresh it loses all your progress with no obvious way to skip ahead. Frustrating.

It can be solved with saving stuff to local storage, but I tried to not use it to be more GDPR compliant...

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#59

This looks great! It was difficult to find out that you had to click the Play button for me "▷". Since this is a primary action you might want to consider adding a stronger Call to Action there?

Thanks for the feedback! I was wondering the same thing.

Re: Show HN: SQL Police Department – Learn SQL while solving crimes

#60

The question where it asks for the list of unique download counts makes no sense.

The cases are randomly generated; It asks for unique values of a random column in a random table. Sometimes it asks for unique password hashes... It's an edge case I didn't account for.
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