SQL Server Q&A

1. What’s 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, where are unique creates a
nonclustered index by default. Another major difference is that, primary key doesn’t allow
NULLs, but unique key allows one NULL only.
2. Write a SQL Query to find first Week Day of month?
SELECT DATENAME(dw, DATEADD(dd, - DATEPART(dd, GETDATE()) + 1, GETDATE())) AS
FirstDay
3. How to find 6th highest salary from Employee table
SELECT TOP 1 salary FROM (SELECT DISTINCT TOP 6 salary FROM employee
ORDER BY salary DESC) a ORDER BY salary
4. What is a join and List different types of joins.
Joins are used in queries to explain how different tables are related. Joins also let you select
data from a table depending upon data from another table. Types of joins: INNER JOINs,
OUTER JOINs, CROSS JOINs. OUTER JOINs are further classified as LEFT OUTER JOINS, RIGHT
OUTER JOINS and FULL OUTER JOINS.
5. How can I enforce to use particular index?
You can use index hint (index=index_name) after the table name. SELECT au_lname FROM
authors (index=aunmind)
6. What is sorting and what is the difference between sorting and clustered indexes?
The ORDER BY clause sorts query results by one or more columns up to 8,060 bytes. This will
happen by the time when we retrieve data from database. Clustered indexes physically sorting
data, while inserting/updating the table.
7. What are the differences between UNION and JOINS?
A join selects columns from 2 or more tables. A union selects rows.
8. What is the Referential Integrity?
Referential integrity refers to the consistency that must be maintained between primary and
foreign keys, i.e. every foreign key value must have a corresponding primary key value
9. What is the row size in SQL Server 2000?
8060 bytes.
10. How to determine the service pack currently installed on SQL Server?
The global variable @@Version stores the build number of the sqlservr.exe, which is used to
determine the service pack installed. eg: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.760 (Intel X86) Dec
17 2002 14:22:05 Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition on
Windows NT 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 3)
11. What is the purpose of UPDATE STATISTICS?
Updates information about the distribution of key values for one or more statistics groups
(collections) in the specified table or indexed view.
12. What is the use of SCOPE_IDENTITY() function?
Returns the most recently created identity value for the tables in the current execution scope.
13. What are the different ways of moving data/databases between servers and databases in SQL
Server?
There are lots of options available, you have to choose your option depending upon your
requirements. Some of the options you have are: BACKUP/RESTORE, detaching and attaching
databases, replication, DTS, BCP, logshipping, INSERT...SELECT, SELECT...INTO, creating
INSERT scripts to generate data.
14. How do you transfer data from text file to database (other than DTS)?
Using the BCP (Bulk Copy Program) utility.
15. What's the difference between DELETE TABLE and TRUNCATE TABLE commands?
DELETE TABLE is a logged operation, so the deletion of each row gets logged in the transaction
log, which makes it slow. TRUNCATE TABLE also deletes all the rows in a table, but it won't log
the deletion of each row, instead it logs the deallocation of the data pages of the table, which
makes it faster. Of course, TRUNCATE TABLE can be rolled back.
16. What is a deadlock?

1
Deadlock is a situation when two processes, each having a lock on one piece of data, attempt to
acquire a lock on the other's piece. Each process would wait indefinitely for the other to release the
lock, unless one of the user processes is terminated. SQL Server detects deadlocks and terminates one
user's process.
17. What is a LiveLock?
A livelock is one, where a request for an exclusive lock is repeatedly denied because a series of
overlapping shared locks keeps interfering. SQL Server detects the situation after four denials
and refuses further shared locks. A livelock also occurs when read transactions monopolize a
table or page, forcing a write transaction to wait indefinitely.
18. How to restart SQL Server in single user mode?
From Startup Options :- Go to SQL Server Properties by right-clicking on the Server name in
the Enterprise manager. Under the 'General' tab, click on 'Startup Parameters'. Enter a value of
-m in the Parameter.
19. Does SQL Server 2000 clustering support load balancing?
SQL Server 2000 clustering does not provide load balancing; it provides failover support. To
achieve load balancing, you need software that balances the load between clusters, not
between servers within a cluster.
20. What is DTC?
The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) is a transaction manager that
allows client applications to include several different sources of data in one transaction. MS DTC
coordinates committing the distributed transaction across all the servers enlisted in the
transaction.
21. What is DTS?
Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Data Transformation Services (DTS) is a set of graphical tools
and programmable objects that lets you extract, transform, and consolidate data from disparate
sources into single or multiple destinations.
22. What are defaults? Is there a column to which a default can't 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.
23. What are the constraints ?
Table Constraints define rules regarding the values allowed in columns and are the standard
mechanism for enforcing integrity. SQL Server 2000 supports five classes of constraints. NOT
NULL , CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY.
24. What is Transaction?
A transaction is a sequence of operations performed as a single logical unit of work. A logical
unit of work must exhibit four properties, called the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and
Durability) properties, to qualify as a transaction.
25. What is Isolation Level?
An isolation level determines the degree of isolation of data between concurrent transactions.
The default SQL Server isolation level is Read Committed. A lower isolation level increases
concurrency, but at the expense of data correctness. Conversely, a higher isolation level
ensures that data is correct, but can affect concurrency negatively. The isolation level required
by an application determines the locking behavior SQL Server uses. SQL-92 defines the
following isolation levels, all of which are supported by SQL Server:

Read uncommitted (the lowest level where transactions are isolated only enough to ensure that
physically corrupt data is not read).
Read committed (SQL Server default level).
Repeatable read.
Serializable (the highest level, where transactions are completely isolated from one another).

Some more Q & A in SQL

1. What is normalization?
Well a relational database is basically composed of tables that contain related data. So the
Process of organizing this data into tables is actually referred to as normalization.

2
2. What is a Stored Procedure?
Its nothing but a set of T-SQL statements combined to perform a single task of several tasks.
Its basically like a Macro so when you invoke the Stored procedure, you actually run a set of
statements.
3. Can you give an example of Stored Procedure?
sp_helpdb , sp_who2, sp_renamedb are a set of system defined stored procedures. We can also
have user defined stored procedures which can be called in similar way.
4. What is a trigger?
Triggers are basically used to implement business rules. Triggers is also similar to stored
procedures. The difference is that it can be activated when data is added or edited or deleted
from a table in a database.
5. What is a view?
If we have several tables in a db and we want to view only specific columns from specific tables
we can go for views. It would also suffice the needs of security some times allowing specfic
users to see only specific columns based on the permission that we can configure on the view.
Views also reduce the effort that is required for writing queries to access specific columns every
time.
6. What is an Index?
When queries are run against a db, an index on that db basically helps in the way the data is
sorted to process the query for faster and data retrievals are much faster when we have an
index.
7. What are the types of indexes available with SQL Server?
There are basically two types of indexes that we use with the SQL Server. Clustered and the
Non-Clustered.
8. What is the basic difference between clustered and a non-clustered index?
The difference is that, Clustered index is unique for any given table and we can have only one
clustered index on a table. The leaf level of a clustered index is the actual data and the data is
resorted in case of clustered index. Whereas in case of non-clustered index the leaf level is
actually a pointer to the data in rows so we can have as many non-clustered indexes as we can
on the db.
9. What are cursors?
Well cursors help us to do an operation on a set of data that we retreive by commands such as
Select columns from table. For example : If we have duplicate records in a table we can remove
it by declaring a cursor which would check the records during retreival one by one and remove
rows which have duplicate values.
10. When do we use the UPDATE_STATISTICS command?
This command is basically used when we do a large processing of data. If we do a large amount
of deletions any modification or Bulk Copy into the tables, we need to basically update the
indexes to take these changes into account. UPDATE_STATISTICS updates the indexes on these
tables accordingly.
11. Which TCP/IP port does SQL Server run on?
SQL Server runs on port 1433 but we can also change it for better security.
12. From where can you change the default port?
From the Network Utility TCP/IP properties –> Port number.both on client and the server.
13. Can you tell me the difference between DELETE & TRUNCATE commands?
Delete command removes the rows from a table based on the condition that we provide with a
WHERE clause. Truncate will actually remove all the rows from a table and there will be no data
in the table after we run the truncate command.
14. Can we use Truncate command on a table which is referenced by FOREIGN KEY?
No. We cannot use Truncate command on a table with Foreign Key because of referential
integrity.
15. What is the use of DBCC commands?
DBCC stands for database consistency checker. We use these commands to check the
consistency of the databases, i.e., maintenance, validation task and status checks.
16. Can you give me some DBCC command options?(Database consistency check)
DBCC CHECKDB - Ensures that tables in the db and the indexes are correctly linked.and DBCC
CHECKALLOC - To check that all pages in a db are correctly allocated. DBCC SQLPERF - It gives

3
 report on current usage of transaction log in percentage. DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP - Checks all
tables file group for any damage.
17. What command do we use to rename a db?
sp_renamedb ‘oldname’ , ‘newname’
18. Well sometimes sp_reanmedb may not work you know because if some one is using the db it will
not accept this command so what do you think you can do in such cases?
In such cases we can first bring to db to single user using sp_dboptions and then we can
rename that db and then we can rerun the sp_dboptions command to remove the single user
mode.
19. What is the difference between a HAVING CLAUSE and a WHERE CLAUSE?
Having Clause is basically used only with the GROUP BY function in a query. WHERE Clause is
applied to each row before they are part of the GROUP BY function in a query.
20. What do you mean by COLLATION?
Collation is basically the sort order. There are three types of sort order Dictionary case
sensitive, Dictonary - case insensitive and Binary.
21. What is a Join in SQL Server?
Join actually puts data from two or more tables into a single result set.
22. Can you explain the types of Joins that we can have with Sql Server?
There are three types of joins: Inner Join, Outer Join, Cross Join
23. When do you use SQL Profiler?
SQL Profiler utility allows us to basically track connections to the SQL Server and also determine
activities such as which SQL Scripts are running, failed jobs etc..
24. What is a Linked Server?
Linked Servers is a concept in SQL Server by which we can add other SQL Server to a Group
and query both the SQL Server dbs using T-SQL Statements.
25. Can you link only other SQL Servers or any database servers such as Oracle?
We can link any server provided we have the OLE-DB provider from Microsoft to allow a link.
For Oracle we have a OLE-DB provider for oracle that microsoft provides to add it as a linked
server to the sql server group.
26. Which stored procedure will you be running to add a linked server?
sp_addlinkedserver, sp_addlinkedsrvlogin
27. What are the OS services that the SQL Server installation adds?
MS SQL SERVER SERVICE, SQL AGENT SERVICE, DTC (Distribution transac co-ordinator)
28. Can you explain the role of each service?
SQL SERVER - is for running the databases SQL AGENT - is for automation such as Jobs, DB
Maintanance, Backups DTC - Is for linking and connecting to other SQL Servers
29. How do you troubleshoot SQL Server if its running very slow?
First check the processor and memory usage to see that processor is not above 80% utilization
and memory not above 40-45% utilization then check the disk utilization using Performance
Monitor, Secondly, use SQL Profiler to check for the users and current SQL activities and jobs
running which might be a problem. Third would be to run UPDATE_STATISTICS command to
update the indexes
30. Lets say due to N/W or Security issues client is not able to connect to server or vice versa. How
do you troubleshoot?
First I will look to ensure that port settings are proper on server and client Network utility for
connections. ODBC is properly configured at client end for connection ——Makepipe & readpipe
are utilities to check for connection. Makepipe is run on Server and readpipe on client to check
for any connection issues.
31. What are the authentication modes in SQL Server?
Windows mode and mixed mode (SQL & Windows).
32. Where do you think the users names and passwords will be stored in sql server?
They get stored in master db in the sysxlogins table.
33. What is log shipping? Can we do logshipping with SQL Server 7.0?
Logshipping is a new feature of SQL Server 2000. We should have two SQL Server - Enterprise
Editions. From Enterprise Manager we can configure the logshipping. In logshipping the
transactional log file from one server is automatically updated into the backup database on the

4
 other server. If one server fails, the other server will have the same db and we can use this as
the DR (disaster recovery) plan.
34. Let us say the SQL Server crashed and you are rebuilding the databases including the master
database what procedure to you follow?
For restoring the master db we have to stop the SQL Server first and then from command line
we can type SQLSERVER –m which will basically bring it into the maintenance mode after which
we can restore the master db.
35. Let us say master db itself has no backup. Now you have to rebuild the db so what kind of action
do you take?
(I am not sure- but I think we have a command to do it).
36. What is BCP? When do we use it?
BulkCopy is a tool used to copy huge amount of data from tables and views. But it won’t copy
the structures of the same.
37. What should we do to copy the tables, schema and views from one SQL Server to another?
We have to write some DTS packages for it.