New quizzes page, quiz author, and daily featured quizzes on Oracle Dev Gym

I’m excited to announce a host of updates to Oracle Dev Gym. These continue Oracle Dev Gym’s traditions of showcasing Oracle APEX, community involvement, and regular quiz taking as a key way to learn.

New quizzes page

Continuing our push to modernize and streamline the Dev Gym interface, we’ve given the quizzes page a fresh new look. Using Oracle APEX’s Card Region, you can view the most recent quizzes available.

In the Latest Quizzes you’ll find:

• A brand-new quiz in our Weekly Database and Logic competitions
• A featured quiz from each of our core domains (SQL, PL/SQL, Database Design, and Logic)
• Your daily quizzer questions

The competitions are your chance to see how your skills compare to other developers. Every Saturday these sport a brand new quiz. These events are live until the end of the following Friday.

Once closed, we make the answers available. We also rank the players who joined the events based on the correctness and speed of their answers. You can view how your knowledge stacks up on the leaderboards.

At the end of each year, we invite the top-ranked players in each competition to a one-off playoff tournament. The entrants complete a series of questions in a timed event designed to stretch their skills. Once complete we rank the players on speed and accuracy and announce the winners.

If you’re more interested in learning, the featured quizzes are drawn from our quiz library. Unlike the competitions, you’ll get your answers immediately.

The daily quizzes are similar, but these are chosen specifically for you. Each day we schedule a quiz from our library you haven’t taken recently for each domain you select.

There’s a lot of detail packed into each card, so here’s a breakdown of what’s covered:

Once you’re logged in to Dev Gym the quizzes page includes:

• A summary of the quizzes you’ve taken recently
• Toggles for which topics you want to get daily quizzes on
• An area to start writing new quizzes

New quizmaster

We’re thrilled to announce a new member to the quiz authoring team: Anthony Harper. He joins me and Kim Berg Hansen as quizmaster for the Weekly Database quiz.

Since joining Dev Gym earlier this year, Anthony has worked his way through our quiz library, taking over 4,500 quizzes on the platform! Following a flurry of quiz submissions, he agreed to join the quiz writing team.

Anthony has been working with Oracle SQL and PL/SQL since Oracle 8i. Because of his background in Philosophy he approaches writing code like any writing activity, focusing on clarity and ease of understanding. 

He enjoys exploring new features as they are introduced in the Oracle platform. He adores the challenge of refactoring complex code for reusability and future maintainability. Database instrumentation of large PL/SQL implementations is his special focus.

He also enjoys music, cooking, science fiction, and everything Star Trek. You can connect with Anthony Harper on LinkedIn and view his coding projects at:

• Oracle events system demo
• Oracle architect tools
• A project planning system for non-profits
• A just-for-fun animation library

We hope you’ll give Anthony a warm welcome. His first quiz is now live – head over to Dev Gym to take it.

Daily featured SQL, PL/SQL, Database Design, and Logic quizzes

We’ve long believed in the power of a daily quizzing routine to help you learn. To help you build this habit we’re now featuring a different quiz from our back catalogue every single day.

We hope this will help you make learning about Oracle Database a daily ritual. As a former Dev Gym (nee PL/SQL Challenge) player myself, I know this can help you understand how SQL and PL/SQL work.

Over the coming months we aim to make more improvements to the UI. We’re also planning more one-off events to help you learn Oracle technologies. Follow me (Chris Saxon) on Twitter or LinkedIn to hear about the latest changes.

We’d love to hear what you think about these new changes. Please submit any comments you have to us using the Feedback option in Dev Gym.