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Solving Sudoku puzzles with T-SQL

Now this is a creative use of Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures: solving Sudoku puzzles:

To make it even more fun for myself, I embarked on an exercise to write a program that solves Sudoku puzzles. And to make it even more challenging I decided not to write the program in the popular object-oriented fashion (Java, C++, C#, etc.) or in any of the old-fashioned procedural programming languages (Pascal, C, Basic etc); but in Transact SQL, within SQL Server 2000. Basically, I wanted to see how the features of T-SQL can be used to develop something like a Sudoku puzzle solution. I have learnt some useful things from the exercise, which I’m eager to pass on to my fellow programmers.

SQL Server 2005 makes even simpler as it is possible to write stored procedures with .NET

Thanks for the tip Marco