SQL Interview Questions

These are the most common yet tricky questions that you can expect in a .NET/SQL interview.

1)      What is the difference between truncate and Delete?

1.  Delete will fire delete trigger, truncate will not.
2. The DELETE statement removes rows one at a time and records an entry in the transaction log for each deleted row.TRUNCATE TABLE removes the data by deallocating the data pages used to store the table data and records only the page deallocations in the transaction log.Once you truncate you can’t rollback.
3. If there is an identity column in the table truncate will reset identity to 1, delete will not.

2)      Name the different type of joins

1. Inner Join
2. Outer Join  (Left Outer Join and Right Outer Join)
3. Cross join
4. Self-Join

3)      What is an Index?

There are two types of indexes. Clustered index and Non Clustered Index. A table can have only 1 Clustered Index while it can have up to 249 & 999 nonclustered indexes on SQL Server 2005 & 2008 respectively. A clustered index stores the actual data rows at the leaf level of the index. Indexes can make Select statement fast but delete, update and insert statements will get slow.

4)      What are different types of Isolation levels in SQL Server

a)     READ UNCOMMITTED

b)      READ COMMITTED

c)       REPEATABLE READ

d)      SERIALIZABLE

e)       SNAPSHOT

 5)      What are different types of constraints in SQL Server?

1.  Primary key Constraint
2. Foreign key Constraint
3. Check Constraint
4. Unique Key Constraint

6)      What is the difference between where and having clause?

A having clause is typically used when you use group by clause.

Example:

SELECT titles.pub_id, AVG(titles.price)
FROM titles INNER JOIN publishers
ON titles.pub_id = publishers.pub_id
WHERE publishers.state = ‘CA’
GROUP BY titles.pub_id
HAVING AVG(titles.price) > 10

WHERE clause is applied first to the individual rows in the tables . Only the rows that meet the conditions in the WHERE clause are grouped. The HAVING clause is then applied to the rows in the result set

7)      How would you do “Error Handling” in SSIS?

SSIS package could mainly have two types of errors

a) Procedure Error: Can be handled in Control flow through the precedence control and redirecting the execution flow.

b) Data Error: is handled in DATA FLOW TASK buy redirecting the data flow using Error Output of a component.

8)      What is the difference between a primary key and a unique key?

Both primary key and unique enforce uniqueness of the column on which they are defined. But by default primary key creates a clustered index on the column. Major difference is that, primary key does not allow NULLs, but unique key allows NULL.

9)      What are defaults? Is there a column to which a default cannot be bound?

A default is a value that will be used by a column, if no value is supplied to that column while inserting data. IDENTITY columns and timestamp columns can’t have defaults bound to them.

You can create default and then bind a column to them.

Example:

//This will create default ” ZipCode ” in database

Create default ZipCode as “78746″

//This will bind the default we created to a column “PostalCode” in table “EmployeeData”

sp_bindefault ZipCode, “EmployeeData.PostalCode”

10)  What is SQL Blocking?

Blocking happens when one connection from an application holds a lock and a second connection requires a conflicting lock type. This forces the second connection to wait, blocked on the first.

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