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Archive for June 25th, 2009

Building permutations: SQL Server

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From Stack Overflow:

I am doing a testing scenario.

There are 6 people in each site:

Site People
Site 1 A, B, C, D, E, F
Site 2 G, H, I, J, K, L
Site 3 M, N, O, P, Q, R
Site 4 S, T, U, V, W, X

I want to write a query that can suggests me datewise the people who can test the site, two at a time.

Here are the rules:

  1. If a person has tested his site on Day 1, then his turn should come on Day 4 and not before that.
    This, however, is applicable for current week. So if A and D test a site on 22nd, B and E test it on 23rd and C and F test on 24th, then for this week, A and D can test the site only on 25th. Sunday is a holiday.
  2. Every week, the pair should change. Rule 1 is still applicable with the new pair.
  3. A person belonging to a particular site cannot test other sites.

To build these rules, we need to do the following:

  1. For each site, split 6 people into 3 pairs.
  2. Assign each pair to the appropriate day of week (pair 1 for Monday and Thursday, pair 2 for Tuesday and Friday, pair 3 for Wednesday and Saturday)
  3. For each new week, split the 6 people new way so that no pairs persist.

Step 3 is most interesting here, since it requires building permutations.

To build the pairs, we need to arrange 6 people and take the pairs from the arrangements.

There are 6! = 720 distinct ways to arrange 6 people.

But for our task the following pairs:

  • (1, 2) and (2, 1)
  • (3, 4) and (4, 3)
  • (5, 6) and (6, 5)

are considered equal. That's why we can use only 720 / 8 = 90 arrangements which yield non-repeating pairs.

SQL Server does not provide a native way to build all permutations of a set. We will have to emulate it using recursive CTE's.

Let's create a table with required data:
Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Quassnoi

June 25th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

Posted in SQL Server