Question:
You are planning to go for a summer vacation and finalized the cities you want to visit. But you have not finalized in which order you want to visit them yet.
Write a SQL query to list out all different possible order you can visit these cities.
Note that you don't want to visit the same city again and you don't want to skip any city in your travel plan either.
Expected output: 
Solution:
Let us create the test data first for the demo.
-- test data use demo; if object_id (N'dbo.city', N'u') is not null drop table dbo.city go create table dbo.city ( id int identity(1,1), city_name varchar(100) ) insert into dbo.city (city_name) values ('Oslo'), ('Helsinki'), ('Stockholm'), ('Copenhagen') select id, city_name from dbo.city This solution is implemented using the Recursive CTE in SQL Server. If you are using other database engines, you can implement it in similar way.
-- solution declare @total_cities int = (select count(1) from dbo.city); with travel (travel_path, level) as ( select cast(city_name as varchar(200)), level = 1 from dbo.city union all select cast(travel.travel_path + ' -> ' + city.city_name as varchar(200)), level = level + 1 from dbo.city inner join travel on level < @total_cities where charindex(city.city_name, travel.travel_path) = 0 ) select id = row_number() over(order by travel_path), travel_path from travel where level = @total_cities order by id If you like this interview question, you may also like this interview question and answer series.
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