Soduku and PL/SQL

In my continuing series of "Isn't it amazing what you can do with PL/SQL?" I offer below an email I received from a very clever fellow named, Phillip Lambert:

Hello Steven,

I'm not sure how much Sudoku puzzles have caught on in the US, but they are fairly big in the UK, particularly in all of the daily papers. Well I've probably been using PL/SQL much too long or probably am well due for retirement out of computers, but I was presented with a challenge the other day which some might consider quite sad. I wrote a Sudoku puzzle solver in SQL and PL/SQL which solves most puzzles presented to it.

The proud thing about it is that a colleague of mine who gave me the idea wasn't able to get his MS Excel VBA solution to work properly. Another colleague also took up the challenge, and again could not get his Java solution to fully work and has spent weeks compared to my days programming it. I'm not sure whether this is saying something for SQL and PL/SQL, but in any event I thought you might be interested. This could be a great opportunity to see whether anyone can use an alternative language to write a solution in less lines of code than a PL/SQL solution - now that would be a challenge!!

To check out Phillip's implementation of a Sudoku puzzler, click here.