SQL Interview Questions Part-2

Q51. What is a Foreign key in SQL?

Foreign key maintains referential integrity by enforcing a link between the data in two tables.
The foreign key in the child table references the primary key in the parent table.
The foreign key constraint prevents actions that would destroy links between the child and parent tables.

Q52. What do you mean by data integrity?

Data Integrity defines the accuracy as well as the consistency of the data stored in a database. It also defines integrity constraints to enforce business rules on the data when it is entered into an application or a database.

Q53. What is the difference between clustered and non-clustered index in SQL?

The differences between the clustered and non clustered index in SQL are :

Clustered index is used for easy retrieval of data from the database and its faster whereas reading from non clustered index is relatively slower.
Clustered index alters the way records are stored in a database as it sorts out rows by the column which is set to be clustered index whereas in a non clustered index, it does not alter the way it was stored but it creates a separate object within a table which points back to the original table rows after searching.
One table can only have one clustered index whereas it can have many non clustered index.

Q54. Write a SQL query to display the current date?

In SQL, there is a built-in function called GetDate() which helps to return the current timestamp/date.

Q55.What do you understand by query optimization?

The phase that identifies a plan for evaluation query which has the least estimated cost is known as query optimization.

The advantages of query optimization are as follows:

The output is provided faster
A larger number of queries can be executed in less time
Reduces time and space complexity

Q56. What do you mean by Denormalization?

Denormalization refers to a technique which is used to access data from higher to lower forms of a database. It helps the database managers to increase the performance of the entire infrastructure as it introduces redundancy into a table. It adds the redundant data into a table by incorporating database queries that combine data from various tables into a single table.

Q57. What are Entities and Relationships?

Entities: A person, place, or thing in the real world about which data can be stored in a database. Tables store data that represents one type of entity. For example – A bank database has a customer table to store customer information. The customer table stores this information as a set of attributes (columns within the table) for each customer.

Relationships: Relation or links between entities that have something to do with each other. For example – The customer name is related to the customer account number and contact information, which might be in the same table. There can also be relationships between separate tables (for example, customer to accounts).

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Q58. What is an Index?

An index refers to a performance tuning method of allowing faster retrieval of records from the table. An index creates an entry for each value and hence it will be faster to retrieve data.

Q59. Explain different types of index in SQL.

There are three types of index in SQL namely:

Unique Index:

This index does not allow the field to have duplicate values if the column is unique indexed. If a primary key is defined, a unique index can be applied automatically.

Clustered Index:

This index reorders the physical order of the table and searches based on the basis of key values. Each table can only have one clustered index.

Non-Clustered Index:

Non-Clustered Index does not alter the physical order of the table and maintains a logical order of the data. Each table can have many nonclustered indexes.

Q60. What is Normalization and what are the advantages of it?

Normalization in SQL is the process of organizing data to avoid duplication and redundancy. Some of the advantages are:

Better Database organization
More Tables with smaller rows
Efficient data access
Greater Flexibility for Queries
Quickly find the information
Easier to implement Security
Allows easy modification
Reduction of redundant and duplicate data
More Compact Database
Ensure Consistent data after modification

Q61. What is the difference between DROP and TRUNCATE commands?

DROP command removes a table and it cannot be rolled back from the database whereas TRUNCATE command removes all the rows from the table.

Q62. Explain different types of Normalization.

There are many successive levels of normalization. These are called normal forms. Each consecutive normal form depends on the previous one.The first three normal forms are usually adequate.

Normal Forms are used in database tables to remove or decrease duplication. The following are the many forms:

First Normal Form:
When every attribute in a relation is a single-valued attribute, it is said to be in first normal form. The first normal form is broken when a relation has a composite or multi-valued property.

Second Normal Form:

A relation is in second normal form if it meets the first normal form’s requirements and does not contain any partial dependencies. In 2NF, a relation has no partial dependence, which means it has no non-prime attribute that is dependent on any suitable subset of any table candidate key. Often, the problem may be solved by setting a single column Primary Key.

Third Normal Form:
If a relation meets the requirements for the second normal form and there is no transitive dependency, it is said to be in the third normal form.

Q63. What is OLTP?

OLTP, or online transactional processing, allows huge groups of people to execute massive amounts of database transactions in real time, usually via the internet. A database transaction occurs when data in a database is changed, inserted, deleted, or queried.

What are the differences between OLTP and OLAP?

OLTP stands for online transaction processing, whereas OLAP stands for online analytical processing. OLTP is an online database modification system, whereas OLAP is an online database query response system.

Q64. How to create empty tables with the same structure as another table?

To create empty tables:

Using the INTO operator to fetch the records of one table into a new table while setting a WHERE clause to false for all entries, it is possible to create empty tables with the same structure. As a result, SQL creates a new table with a duplicate structure to accept the fetched entries, but nothing is stored into the new table since the WHERE clause is active.

Q65. What is PostgreSQL?

In 1986, a team lead by Computer Science Professor Michael Stonebraker created PostgreSQL under the name Postgres. It was created to aid developers in the development of enterprise-level applications by ensuring data integrity and fault tolerance in systems. PostgreSQL is an enterprise-level, versatile, resilient, open-source, object-relational database management system that supports variable workloads and concurrent users. The international developer community has constantly backed it. PostgreSQL has achieved significant appeal among developers because to its fault-tolerant characteristics.
It’s a very reliable database management system, with more than two decades of community work to thank for its high levels of resiliency, integrity, and accuracy. Many online, mobile, geospatial, and analytics applications utilise PostgreSQL as their primary data storage or data warehouse.

Q66. What are SQL comments?

SQL Comments are used to clarify portions of SQL statements and to prevent SQL statements from being executed. Comments are quite important in many programming languages. The comments are not supported by a Microsoft Access database. As a result, the Microsoft Access database is used in the examples in Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
Single Line Comments: It starts with two consecutive hyphens (–).
Multi-line Comments: It starts with /* and ends with */.

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Q67. What is the difference between the RANK() and DENSE_RANK() functions?

The RANK() function in the result set defines the rank of each row within your ordered partition. If both rows have the same rank, the next number in the ranking will be the previous rank plus a number of duplicates. If we have three records at rank 4, for example, the next level indicated is 7.

The DENSE_RANK() function assigns a distinct rank to each row within a partition based on the provided column value, with no gaps. It always indicates a ranking in order of precedence. This function will assign the same rank to the two rows if they have the same rank, with the next rank being the next consecutive number. If we have three records at rank 4, for example, the next level indicated is 5.

Q68. What is SQL Injection?

SQL injection is a sort of flaw in website and web app code that allows attackers to take control of back-end processes and access, retrieve, and delete sensitive data stored in databases. In this approach, malicious SQL statements are entered into a database entry field, and the database becomes exposed to an attacker once they are executed. By utilising data-driven apps, this strategy is widely utilised to get access to sensitive data and execute administrative tasks on databases. SQLi attack is another name for it.

The following are some examples of SQL injection:

Getting access to secret data in order to change a SQL query to acquire the desired results.
UNION attacks are designed to steal data from several database tables.
Examine the database to get information about the database’s version and structure

Q69. How many Aggregate functions are available in SQL?

SQL aggregate functions provide information about a database’s data. AVG, for example, returns the average of a database column’s values.

SQL provides seven (7) aggregate functions, which are given below:

AVG(): returns the average value from specified columns.
COUNT(): returns the number of table rows, including rows with null values.
MAX(): returns the largest value among the group.
MIN(): returns the smallest value among the group.
SUM(): returns the total summed values(non-null) of the specified column.
FIRST(): returns the first value of an expression.
LAST(): returns the last value of an expression.

Q70. What is the default ordering of data using the ORDER BY clause? How could it be changed?

The ORDER BY clause in MySQL can be used without the ASC or DESC modifiers. The sort order is preset to ASC or ascending order when this attribute is absent from the ORDER BY clause.

Q71. How do we use the DISTINCT statement? What is its use?

The SQL DISTINCT keyword is combined with the SELECT query to remove all duplicate records and return only unique records. There may be times when a table has several duplicate records.
The DISTINCT clause in SQL is used to eliminate duplicates from a SELECT statement’s result set.

Q72. What are the syntax and use of the COALESCE function?

From a succession of expressions, the COALESCE function returns the first non-NULL value. The expressions are evaluated in the order that they are supplied, and the function’s result is the first non-null value. Only if all of the inputs are null does the COALESCE method return NULL.

The syntax of COALESCE function is COALESCE (exp1, exp2, …. expn)

Q73. What is the ACID property in a database?

ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. It is used to ensure that the data transactions are processed reliably in a database system.

Atomicity: Atomicity refers to the transactions that are completely done or failed where transaction refers to a single logical operation of a data. It means if one part of any transaction fails, the entire transaction fails and the database state is left unchanged.
Consistency: Consistency ensures that the data must meet all the validation rules. In simple words, you can say that your transaction never leaves the database without completing its state.
Isolation: The main goal of isolation is concurrency control.
Durability: Durability means that if a transaction has been committed, it will occur whatever may come in between such as power loss, crash or any sort of error.

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Q74. What do you mean by “Trigger” in SQL?

Trigger in SQL is are a special type of stored procedures that are defined to execute automatically in place or after data modifications. It allows you to execute a batch of code when an insert, update or any other query is executed against a specific table.

Q75. What are the different operators available in SQL?

There are three operators available in SQL, namely:

Arithmetic Operators
Logical Operators
Comparison Operators

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Q76. Are NULL values same as that of zero or a blank space?

A NULL value is not at all same as that of zero or a blank space. NULL value represents a value which is unavailable, unknown, assigned or not applicable whereas a zero is a number and blank space is a character.

Q77. What is the difference between cross join and natural join?

The cross join produces the cross product or Cartesian product of two tables whereas the natural join is based on all the columns having the same name and data types in both the tables.

Q78. What is subquery in SQL?

A subquery is a query inside another query where a query is defined to retrieve data or information back from the database. In a subquery, the outer query is called as the main query whereas the inner query is called subquery. Subqueries are always executed first and the result of the subquery is passed on to the main query. It can be nested inside a SELECT, UPDATE or any other query. A subquery can also use any comparison operators such as >,< or =.

Q79. What are the different types of a subquery?

There are two types of subquery namely, Correlated and Non-Correlated.

Correlated subquery: These are queries which select the data from a table referenced in the outer query. It is not considered as an independent query as it refers to another table and refers the column in a table.

Non-Correlated subquery: This query is an independent query where the output of subquery is substituted in the main query.

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Q80. List the ways to get the count of records in a table?

To count the number of records in a table in SQL, you can use the below commands:

SELECT * FROM table1

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table1

SELECT rows FROM sysindexes WHERE id = OBJECT_ID(table1) AND indid < 2

Q81. Write a SQL query to find the names of employees that begin with ‘A’?

To display name of the employees that begin with ‘A’, type in the below command:

1	`SELECT * FROM Table_name WHERE EmpName like 'A%'`

Q82. Write a SQL query to get the third-highest salary of an employee from employee_table?

SELECT TOP 1 salary
FROM(
SELECT TOP 3 salary
FROM employee_table
ORDER BY salary DESC) AS emp
ORDER BY salary ASC;

Q83. What is the need for group functions in SQL?

Group functions work on the set of rows and return one result per group. Some of the commonly used group functions are: AVG, COUNT, MAX, MIN, SUM, VARIANCE.

Q84. What is a Relationship and what are they?

Relation or links are between entities that have something to do with each other. Relationships are defined as the connection between the tables in a database. There are various relationships, namely:

One to One Relationship.
One to Many Relationship.
Many to One Relationship.
Self-Referencing Relationship.

Q85. How can you insert NULL values in a column while inserting the data?

NULL values in SQL can be inserted in the following ways:

Implicitly by omitting column from column list.
Explicitly by specifying NULL keyword in the VALUES clause

Q86. What is the main difference between ‘BETWEEN’ and ‘IN’ condition operators?

BETWEEN operator is used to display rows based on a range of values in a row whereas the IN condition operator is used to check for values contained in a specific set of values.

Example of BETWEEN:

SELECT * FROM Students where ROLL_NO BETWEEN 10 AND 50;

Example of IN:

SELECT * FROM students where ROLL_NO IN (8,15,25);

Q87. Why are SQL functions used?

SQL functions are used for the following purposes:

To perform some calculations on the data
To modify individual data items
To manipulate the output
To format dates and numbers
To convert the data types

Q88. What is the need for MERGE statement?

This statement allows conditional update or insertion of data into a table. It performs an UPDATE if a row exists, or an INSERT if the row does not exist.

Q89. What do you mean by recursive stored procedure?

Recursive stored procedure refers to a stored procedure which calls by itself until it reaches some boundary condition. This recursive function or procedure helps the programmers to use the same set of code n number of times.

Q90. What is CLAUSE in SQL?

SQL clause helps to limit the result set by providing a condition to the query. A clause helps to filter the rows from the entire set of records.

For example – WHERE, HAVING clause.

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Q91. What is the difference between ‘HAVING’ CLAUSE and a ‘WHERE’ CLAUSE?

HAVING clause can be used only with SELECT statement. It is usually used in a GROUP BY clause and whenever GROUP BY is not used, HAVING behaves like a WHERE clause.
Having Clause is only used with the GROUP BY function in a query whereas WHERE Clause is applied to each row before they are a part of the GROUP BY function in a query.

Q92. List the ways in which Dynamic SQL can be executed?

Following are the ways in which dynamic SQL can be executed:

Write a query with parameters.
Using EXEC.
Using sp_executesql.

Q93. What are the various levels of constraints?

Constraints are the representation of a column to enforce data entity and consistency. There are two levels of a constraint, namely:

column level constraint
table level constraint

Q94. How can you fetch common records from two tables?

You can fetch common records from two tables using INTERSECT. For example:

Select studentID from student. <strong>INTERSECT </strong> Select StudentID from Exam

Q95. List some case manipulation functions in SQL?

There are three case manipulation functions in SQL, namely:

LOWER: This function returns the string in lowercase. It takes a string as an argument and returns it by converting it into lower case. Syntax:

 LOWER(‘string’)

UPPER: This function returns the string in uppercase. It takes a string as an argument and returns it by converting it into uppercase. Syntax:

UPPER(‘string’)

INITCAP: This function returns the string with the first letter in uppercase and rest of the letters in lowercase. Syntax:

 INITCAP(‘string’)

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Q96. What are the different set operators available in SQL?

Some of the available set operators are – Union, Intersect or Minus operators.

Q97. What is an ALIAS command?

ALIAS command in SQL is the name that can be given to any table or a column. This alias name can be referred in WHERE clause to identify a particular table or a column.

For example-

Select emp.empID, dept.Result from employee emp, department as dept where emp.empID=dept.empID

In the above example, emp refers to alias name for employee table and dept refers to alias name for department table.

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Q98. What are aggregate and scalar functions?

Aggregate functions are used to evaluate mathematical calculation and returns a single value. These calculations are done from the columns in a table. For example- max(),count() are calculated with respect to numeric.

Scalar functions return a single value based on the input value. For example – UCASE(), NOW() are calculated with respect to string.

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Q99. How can you fetch alternate records from a table?

You can fetch alternate records i.e both odd and even row numbers. For example- To display even numbers, use the following command:

Select studentId from (Select rowno, studentId from student) where mod(rowno,2)=0

Now, to display odd numbers:

Select studentId from (Select rowno, studentId from student) where mod(rowno,2)=1

Q100. Name the operator which is used in the query for pattern matching?

LIKE operator is used for pattern matching, and it can be used as -.

% – It matches zero or more characters.

For example- select * from students where studentname like ‘a%’

_ (Underscore) – it matches exactly one character.
For example- select * from student where studentname like ‘abc_’

Q101. How can you select unique records from a table?

You can select unique records from a table by using the DISTINCT keyword.

Select DISTINCT studentID from Student

Using this command, it will print unique student id from the table Student.

Q102. How can you fetch first 5 characters of the string?

There are a lot of ways to fetch characters from a string. For example:

Select SUBSTRING(StudentName,1,5) as studentname from student

Q103. What is the main difference between SQL and PL/SQL?

SQL is a query language that allows you to issue a single query or execute a single insert/update/delete whereas PL/SQL is Oracle’s “Procedural Language” SQL, which allows you to write a full program (loops, variables, etc.) to accomplish multiple operations such as selects/inserts/updates/deletes.

Q104. What is a View?

A view is a virtual table which consists of a subset of data contained in a table. Since views are not present, it takes less space to store. View can have data of one or more tables combined and it depends on the relationship.

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Q105. What are Views used for?

A view refers to a logical snapshot based on a table or another view. It is used for the following reasons:

Restricting access to data.
Making complex queries simple.
Ensuring data independence.
Providing different views of same data.

Q106. What is a Stored Procedure?

A Stored Procedure is a function which consists of many SQL statements to access the database system. Several SQL statements are consolidated into a stored procedure and execute them whenever and wherever required which saves time and avoid writing code again and again.

Q107. List some advantages and disadvantages of Stored Procedure?

Advantages:

A Stored Procedure can be used as a modular programming which means create once, store and call for several times whenever it is required. This supports faster execution. It also reduces network traffic and provides better security to the data.

Disadvantage:

The only disadvantage of Stored Procedure is that it can be executed only in the database and utilizes more memory in the database server.

Q108. List all the types of user-defined functions?

There are three types of user-defined functions, namely:

Scalar Functions
Inline Table-valued functions
Multi-statement valued functions

Scalar returns the unit, variant defined the return clause. Other two types of defined functions return table.

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Q109. What do you mean by Collation?

Collation is defined as a set of rules that determine how data can be sorted as well as compared. Character data is sorted using the rules that define the correct character sequence along with options for specifying case-sensitivity, character width etc.

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Q110. What are the different types of Collation Sensitivity?

Following are the different types of collation sensitivity:

Case Sensitivity: A and a and B and b.
Kana Sensitivity: Japanese Kana characters.
Width Sensitivity: Single byte character and double-byte character.
Accent Sensitivity.

Q111. What are Local and Global variables?

Local variables:

These variables can be used or exist only inside the function. These variables are not used or referred by any other function.

Global variables:

These variables are the variables which can be accessed throughout the program. Global variables cannot be created whenever that function is called.

Q112. What is Auto Increment in SQL?

Autoincrement keyword allows the user to create a unique number to get generated whenever a new record is inserted into the table.
This keyword is usually required whenever PRIMARY KEY in SQL is used.

AUTO INCREMENT keyword can be used in Oracle and IDENTITY keyword can be used in SQL SERVER.

Q113. What is a Datawarehouse?

Datawarehouse refers to a central repository of data where the data is assembled from multiple sources of information. Those data are consolidated, transformed and made available for the mining as well as online processing. Warehouse data also have a subset of data called Data Marts.

Q114. What are the different authentication modes in SQL Server? How can it be changed?

Windows mode and Mixed Mode – SQL and Windows. You can go to the below steps to change authentication mode in SQL Server:

Click Start> Programs> Microsoft SQL Server and click SQL Enterprise Manager to run SQL Enterprise Manager from the Microsoft SQL Server program group.
Then select the server from the Tools menu.
Select SQL Server Configuration Properties, and choose the Security page.

Q115. What are STUFF and REPLACE function?

STUFF Function: This function is used to overwrite existing character or inserts a string into another string. Syntax:

STUFF(string_expression,start, length, replacement_characters)

where,
string_expression: it is the string that will have characters substituted

start: This refers to the starting position
length: It refers to the number of characters in the string which are substituted.

replacement_string: They are the new characters which are injected in the string.

REPLACE function: This function is used to replace the existing characters of all the occurrences. Syntax:

REPLACE (string_expression, search_string, replacement_string)

Here every search_string in the string_expression will be replaced with the replacement_string.

So this brings us to the end of the SQL interview questions blog. I hope this set of SQL Interview Questions will help you ace your job interview. All the best for your interview!

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