[mattzito]

Well, as other posters have commented you sort of do, but since we let you use libraries and the like, you had lots of options:

- sqlite

- Storable (perl)

- serialize some other data structure to disk

- in-memory

I seem to recall one or two people over the years who wanted to install a relational database as part of the code to store stuff - we were fine with that as long as you then showed all the right behaviors for dealing with relational databases (using transactions, catching errors, etc.)

But most people read it in and store it in memory - there was only a few thousand rows.

[tayo42]

I guess my intuition was right. I was mostly curious if there was some other clever way of handling this. Mostly related to being able to query the data arbitrarily

[mattzito]

I don't even remember how sophisticated the querying had to be - I think it was something like:

- find and display all movies by the specified year

- substring text searches in the title

Maybe one other. But it wasn't even approaching anything really sophisticated. We just wanted to see that people could write a basic logic flow, read-and-write data application.

Then for the people who did finish it, we looked at the code. Was it well commented, well thought out, did it have error handling (what if the input file doesn't exist? What if something eats your data file while it's running?), what assumptions did they make.

So the base test was basically a sniff test - if you can't do this, you're not a good enough developer to work here. If you can do it, we'll look at the quality of the result to assess how senior you are.