Friday, November 19, 2010

SQL Interview Questions

Here is a collection of Microsoft SQL Server interview questions.
Basic Concepts
  • Filtered index
  • Common Table Expression
  • Derived tables
  • Fill factor
  • Clustered Index
  • Heap table
  • OLTP vs. OLAP
  • Star schema
  • What are the differences between SQL developer, standard and enterprise editions
  • local vs. global temporary table
  • sparse columns
  • Functions: STUFF, PATINDEX, RANK, NTILE
  • SCOPE_IDENTITY vs. @@IDENTITY
  • XML support
  • Geo-spatial data support
  • CLR integration
  • Replication
Breadth
  • NoSQL
  • Column based RDBMS
Best Practices
  • What are the performance best practices
  • What are the security best practices
Coding Skills
  • How to select top N records without using TOP
  • Write a stored procedure to check out one job with columns: JobID, Status (new, checked out, done), priority
  • Write a stored procedure to atomically insert records into the following tables with error handling
Table A
---------
ID
Name

Table B
---------
ID
Name

Table A_B
---------
ID_A
ID_B