Challenge #25: Creating Merchant Combos

[aclaxton]

I got most of the way but I had to poke around the forums for a way to get rid of reciprocal duplicates :) 

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[justin_winter]

Going back in our user group and doing old challenges. This was rough, I tackled it a couple different ways before I settled on an approach I liked. It was still fairly hard coded, so if I were to do this for real, I would want to build out the summations and mud functions to do it dynamically with math. 

[kcgreen]

This one took me lots of trial and error to get right.  Reading the comments, I felt better knowing that I wasn't the only one to struggle on this challenge.

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[kelly_gilbert]

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Today I learned that the Sort tool sorts uppercase letters first, while comparison ([Merchant1] < [Merchant2]) sorts alphabetically, regardless of case. 

This was noticeable in the combination of Chick-fil-A and CVS.  I originally tried to solve this without the recordID, by filtering for [Merchant1] < [Merchant2].  However, that put Chick-fil-A in Merchant1 and CVS in Merchant2.  The solution has CVS in Merchant1and Chick-fil-A in Merchant2,

[dominiklz]

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I came out on a different number of rows then the original one, because I left out the rows where a merchant is connected to Null, even though there are valid connections for said row. (see below)

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[asabau]

Here it is!

[maxjohnson02]

This one was particularly difficult for me as I was totally unfamiliar with cartesian joins going into it. Good practice though!

[daniel_ferreira]

Follow my solution file attached...