The 2nd CUBRID Contest has come to an end - it’s time to bring down the curtains and announce the happy winners!

…But wait! Let us first go through a short recap…

The contest has started on 1^st of June and you had 3 weeks to find and submit your best solution(s), to advertise the contest among your friends, and to submit your feedback and your suggestions… And guess what - after those 3 weeks, we ended up with sooo many submissions and, best of all, of great quality!!

So let us say to you all: Thank you very much for your hard work, and for taking the time to look into CUBRID!

If you would like to find out more about the competiotion please consult the CUBRID it! Challenge page.

How did we select the winners?

Selecting the winners proved to be a much more difficult task than we initially thought, simply because of the many high quality submissions we received! After a very strict analysis of the correctness of the solutions, by running on multiple test databases and filtering the solutions with less than average performance timings, we ended up with a pool of 20 solutions from which we still needed to select further just 10... A difficult task!

So we looked deeper into:

• The code quality: simplicity, comments etc.
• The performance: speed/memory
• The design (for example, there were a couple of solution which choose a server-side processing, which saved network bandwidth, client memory etc.)
• Innovation
• And not the last, we looked into the feedback you gave along with the code

All in all, it’s nothing else but good news: Because we had such a hard time to find the winners, we decided to increase the number of prizes from 10 to 18!!! Hooray..!

…Now, some facts (and some questions from us)…

• The 1^st prize was won by a “plain" PHP solution
• The 1^st prize was awarded 92 points (out of a maximum of 100)
• One contestant forgot to submit his user id along with the solution file… :) No worries - we figured it out in the end…
• There were 3 times more Java solutions than PHP solutions
• What would you do when somebody submits a solution which works just great, except for the part when it’s coming down to insert the final results in the results table…?! :)
• Are you sure your code is handling properly a database with no “public"-access tables…?
• One contestant submitted a solution based on CONNECT BY…! Cool!
• On contestant “sacrificed" the performance for the sake of outputting a lot of data (in the console) during processing… ...unfortunately, there was a performance penalty here, sorry!
• There were contestants who submitted solutions in both Java and PHP…!
• Now try to remember… …have you tested your solution on both 8.3.1 and 8.4? :)
• 95% of the submissions were zip, 2% rar, 2% not compressed and 1% gz, tar etc.

Your feedback – We are listening…

You sent us a lot of great suggestions, feedback, proposals and ideas… We will surely take all of them into consideration, not just for the next contest, but for improving CUBRID as well!

…Here are just some extracts from the feedback you sent:

• "…thank you for the opportunity and for this nice challenge" (Claudiu Nita)
• "Thank you for your competition! In the next contest I would like to see more specific SQL. Optimization of SQL queries is the most interesting in such competitions." (mubinov)
• "A Mac OS X version could be cool, even if OS X is not often used for web servers." (Alexandre Grison)
• "…Overall I’m impressed with CUBRID seems to be very fast…" (Mihai)
• "…it will be interesting a concept of transposing the database in other format or to clone it somewhere" (Claudiu Nita)
• "…Please make it possible to use variables in FROM clause of PREPARE statement" (artemkv)
• "…A great contest, made me feel good – Thank you!" (MC)
• "…a contest that would show how well CUBRID performs on a real time web application with high traffic." (Alexandre Grison)

Thank you very much!

The advertisement challenge

Let's not forget about those that helped us spread the word, the happy winners are:

What’s next?

…Well…. …stay tune for the next CUBRID Contest…!

And in the meantime, we have more interesting projects and challenges coming soon, so remember to regularly visit www.cubrid.org for more information, or, even better, just register on CUBRID forum.

We truly appreciate everybody’s participation in the contest!