Re: A neutral challenge.

"Peter Koch Larsen" <pkl_at_mailme.dk> wrote in message news:61c84197.0306250318.71c26eca_at_posting.google.com...
> Costins challenge was interesting to me, being unfamiliar with oo-dbms
> systems. I was not sure that it was quite fair, however, it being very
> much non oo-like.
> I grab the opportunity to propose another challenge to a conceptually
> very simple problem: scheduling of a meeting.
>
> Consider a group of persons who are to have a meeting. This meeting
> has to take place at a time where no other meeting for the people
> involved takes place, of course.
> Each person has a calender where the available (or if you prefer so,
> the unavailable time) for that person is noted. As an example, John
> might have this calender:
>
> Mon:
> 11-16: available
> Tuesday:
> 9-11: available
> 13-16: available
>
> Andrea might have this calender.
>
> Monday:
> 9-15: available
> Tuesday:
> 10-12: available
> 13-16: available
>
> The program should list periods where alle attendees are available.
> For John and Andrea, the result would be:
>
> Available:
> Monday:
> 11-15
> Tuesday:
> 10-11
> 13-16
>
> The user should then be able to pick one of the available time-frames
> and let the system schedule the meeting at that frame.
>
> I believe this challenge is interesting for both camps as this is a
> realistic problem that often has to be solved in practival life. Also
> this gives the oo-oriented camp the possibility to have some slight
> form of object-orientation (the intervals) and it is not a problem,
> that may be modeled directly via some relational join-operation.
> After having solved this problem, it would be interesting to extend
> the solution to involve not only persons but also other kind of
> resources (e.g. a conference room and a projector). What changes would
> you hace to but into the original solution (assuming of course that
> this problem had been anticipated berforehand).
> I do not propose to solve this problem myself, but it would be
> interesting to see if others could sketch a solution using their own
> favorite DBMS. Of course, the solution must be sound with regards to
> criteria such as time-consumption and safety w.r.t. multiple updates.
>
> Kind regards
> Peter

Does 'Monday' represent a specific date or a recurring availability on every monday? Received on Wed Jun 25 2003 - 18:01:46 CEST