Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division (Build 24270752)

Become a Database Detective in this new (unpaid) work from home opportunity. There’s been a backlog of unsolved cases piling up in the Minor Crimes Division of the Los Zorangeles Police Department and we’ll need a Database Detective to help solve them. We’ll need you to analyze clues and manipulate data using SQL, a database querying language, to figure out who perpetrated crimes from as minor as littering to as serious as not checking out of a hotel after the check-out time. Don’t worry! This role is intended to be accessible for those without any SQL experience in Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division, so each Database Detective is given an introductory textbook when they start!

This short textbook is less than 20 pages and explains everything that’s needed to solve each case. If you still have trouble writing queries, our comprehensive error messaging system will tell you exactly where your query went wrong, making it easy to correct your mistakes. Still not enough? Each Database Detective is assigned an assistant who’s ready to answer any questions you might have, whether they be about the case itself or the SQL queries you’ll need to write! Even if you’re a SQL power user, this is a good one because you don’t get to use some of the options you might normally rely on, like `CONCAT`, `COALESCE`, `CASE` statements, or `UNION`s. CTEs haven’t been tested yet.

The puzzles start out incredibly easy, but this isn’t just a SQL coding game. There’s a genuine sleuthing and puzzle-solving aspect to finding data dumps and understanding what they might be used for, on top of the coding constraints. It’s a genuine delight at Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division. For example, one of the coding constraints becomes apparent in the middle puzzles. At first, you’re given a perpetrator list or can easily find one before filtering it using various criteria. Later on, you have to construct one yourself. Having `UNION` would make it much easier to merge something like 12 different tables that each contain a list of players in an MMO guild.

The natural approach would be to build a master player dimension table. This is an educational detective game where SQL is used to solve very serious cases—like figuring out who put pineapple on pizza. Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division actually does a good job of teaching the concepts. It lets you create new tables from query results, which becomes very important in the later cases, and it has excellent code highlighting. It’s unironically a great place to improve SQL skills while having fun. However, Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division isn’t just about programming. You first have to figure out what needs to be done, and that’s where the detective aspect comes in.