This problem is designed to come up with a solution that uses the smallest amount of storage possible for a 1,000 seat restaurant.
I've come up with a solution that need only 125 bytes of storage. All other solutions covered in Mr Celko's book has at least 1,000 bytes of storage.
Here is my solution, complete with all procedures to assign and release seats, together with views to display current status of each and one seat.
-- Setup sample data
CREATE TABLE dbo.Restaurant
(
Seats BINARY(125) NOT NULL
)
-- Initialize an empty restaurant
INSERT dbo.Restaurant
(
Seats
)
SELECT 0x
GO
-- Create procedure for handling seat assignment
CREATE...