Waaaaay back in 2010, on April 8 to be specific, I started a website called the PL/SQL Challenge. It featured a daily PL/SQL quiz (yes, that's right - a new quiz every weekday!) and gave Oracle Database developers a way to both deepen and demonstrate their expertise. Players were ranked and competed for top honors in our annual championships.
Not quite as waaaaay back, in 2014, I rejoined Oracle Corporation after 22 years away (from the company, not from the technology). The PL/SQL Challenge came with me, and a year later we rebranded it as the Oracle Dev Gym.
Today, we offer quizzes on SQL, PL/SQL, database design, logic, Java and Application Express. We've added workouts and classes.
Yesterday we celebrated the ninth anniversary of the Dev Gym / PL/SQL Challenge. And my oh my but Oracle Database developers have been busy!
Here are some stats from those nine years:
- Almost 35,000 developers and DBAs have taken quizzes on the site, a total of 1.27M answers submitted.
- They spent a total of over 118 YEARS of their cumulative time taking quizzes, workouts and classes.
- Their average grade on quizzes is 75% (we have a lot of tough quizzes!).
- Roughly 3,500 developers have been active on the site in the last three months.
- We've had almost 35,000 sign-ups for our Dev Gym classes (the most popular being Chris Saxon's Databases for Developers classes).
- Individual workouts have also been very popular, with just under 33,000 taken.
The Dev Gym has become an essential part of the learning experience for thousands of developers. They've discovered new features of the database, learned from other developers, and even written their own quizzes for everyone to play.
If you haven't yet tried the Dev Gym, come check it out!