A new friend offered me a Valuable Prize if I could help him solve a database problem. Take table B with primary key id. Table A lists zero or more transactions for each id of type link_type. He asked for an SQL query to list each id in table B, except those having any transactions in table A with a link_type of 2. So I gave him an answer.
For my Valuable Prize, he treated me to dinner and a movie. On Sunday, we met at the Pocono Cinema and Coffee Shop to see Snow Falling on Cedars
, a melodrama about a murder trial, and about persecution of Japanese Americans during the Great War.
It’s a visual title for a visual movie. The camera pauses for a close‐up of dew dripping from a leaf, or to look around a well‐furnished room, or to drink in a gorgeous landscape. Thus the film runs longer than necessary, belaboring established plot points, especially in the romantic subplot. Entranced by lush images, I didn’t notice how slow the movie was until a fellow audience member started to snore.
The director seems fond of the effect of looking at things through glass. Watching smeary figures approach through old glass of varying thickness, peering through snow‐flecked windshields, looking through a window reflecting someone’s face. Not symbolic or meaningful, just a motif, like smoke in Ridley Scott action movies.
It’s not a deep movie. The moral issues are not complex, and the performances are not very nuanced. But it is a feast for the eyes.
- My answer:
select id from B where id not in (select id from A where link_type = 2)