Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015

SQL Query Interview Questions and Answers

What is SQL?
 SQL stands for Structured Query Language
 SQL lets you access and manipulate databases
 SQL is an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard

What Can SQL do?

 SQL can execute queries against a database
 SQL can retrieve data from a database
 SQL can insert records in a database
 SQL can update records in a database
 SQL can delete records from a database
 SQL can create new databases
 SQL can create new tables in a database
 SQL can create stored procedures in a database
 SQL can create views in a database
 SQL can set permissions on tables, procedures, and views

SubLanguages of SQL
 DDL: This is a set of command is used to design the structure in
Database.CREATE,ALTER and DROP are some of the following DDL Commands.
 DML: This is a set of command is used to manipulate the data in database
manipulation of data include insertion ,updation and deletion of record from the
table.SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE and DELETE are some of the following DML
commands.
 DCL: This is a set of command is used to control the data in database .SQL used
GRANT statement to give permission or REVOKE is used to take back permission.
 TCL : Any changes make by DML Command is not make permanent to confirm this
changes SQL uses COMMIT statement or the other hand ROLLBACK is used to
get back to the state it was in before the changes were made.

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015

SYNTAX
CRATE COMMAND:
CREATE TABLE Persons
(
PersonID int primary key,
LastName varchar(255),
FirstName varchar(255),
Address varchar(255),
City varchar(255)
);

ALTER COMMAND:
To add column
ALTER TABLE table_name
ADD column_name datatype

To DROP Column
ALTER TABLE table_name
DROP COLUMN column_name

DROP COMMAND:
DROP TABLE TABLENAME

Insert command :

Suppose the table have following fields :rollno,name,course,phno in we want to store the value in all
fields :

Insert into tablename(rollno,name,course,phno) values(‘1001’,’alax’,’it’,’9078122336’);

If table have four field but we have to store the value only in two or three field IN this case query is

Insert into tablename(rollno,name,phno) values(‘1001’,’alax’,’9078122336’);

Update command :

Update tablename set rollno=’111’,name=’ajay’ where rollno=’101’

Delete command :

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Delete from tablename

(It delete all the records from table)

Delete from tablename where rollnos=’1001’

Delete the record of those student whose rollnos is 1001.

Select Command:

Select * from tablename(Select all the records)

Select rollno,name from tablename(Select only roll no and name)

SQL Query Interview Questions and Answers

Question 1: SQL Query to find second highest salary of Employee

Answer : There are many ways to find second highest salary of Employee in SQL, you can either use
SQL Join or Subquery to solve this problem. Here is SQL query using Subquery :

select MAX(Salary) from Employee WHERE Salary NOT IN (select MAX(Salary) from Employee );

Question 2: SQL Query to find Max Salary from each department.

Answer : You can find maximum salary for each department by grouping all records by
DeptId and then using MAX() function to calculate maximum salary in each group or each
department.

SELECT DeptID, MAX(Salary) FROM Employee GROUP BY DeptID.

This questions become more interesting if Interviewer will ask you to print department name
instead of department id, in that case you need to join Employee table with Department using
foreign key DeptID, make sure you do LEFT or RIGHT OUTER JOIN to include
departments without any employee as well. Here is the query

SELECT DeptName, MAX(Salary) FROM Employee e RIGHT JOIN Department d ON

e.DeptId = d.DeptID GROUP BY DeptName;

In this query we have use RIGHT OUTER JOIN because we need name of department from
Department table which is on right side of JOIN clause, even if there is no reference of
dept_id on Employee table.

Question 3: Write SQL Query to display current date.

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
Answer : SQL has built in function called GetDate() which returns current timestamp.
This will work in Microsoft SQL Server, other vendors like Oracle and MySQL also has
equivalent functions.
SELECT GetDate();

Question 4: Write an SQL Query to check whether date passed to Query is date of given
format or not.
Answer : SQL has IsDate() function which is used to check passed value is date or not of
specified format ,it returns 1(true) or 0(false) accordingly. Remember ISDATE() is
a MSSQL function and it may not work on Oracle, MySQL or any other database but there
would be something similar.

SELECT ISDATE('1/08/13') AS "MM/DD/YY";

It will return 0 because passed date is not in correct format.

Question 5: Write a SQL Query to print the name of distinct employee whose DOB is
between 01/01/1960 to 31/12/1975.
Answer : This SQL query is tricky but you can use BETWEEN clause to get all records
whose date fall between two dates.
SELECT DISTINCT EmpName FROM Employees WHERE DOB BETWEEN
‘01/01/1960’ AND ‘31/12/1975’;

Question 6: Write an SQL Query find number of employees according to gender whose
DOB is between 01/01/1960 to 31/12/1975.
Answer :

SELECT COUNT(*), sex from Employees WHERE DOB BETWEEN '01/01/1960' AND
'31/12/1975' GROUP BY sex;

Question 7: Write an SQL Query to find employee whose Salary is equal or greater
than 10000.
Answer :

SELECT EmpName FROM Employees WHERE Salary>=10000;

Question 8: Write an SQL Query to find name of employee whose name Start with ‘M’
Answer :

SELECT * FROM Employees WHERE EmpName like 'M%';

Question 9: find all Employee records containing the word "Joe", regardless of whether
it was stored as JOE, Joe, or joe.

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
Answer :

SELECT * from Employees WHERE UPPER(EmpName) like '%JOE%';

Question 10: Write a SQL Query to find year from date.

Answer : Here is how you can find Year from a Date in SQL Server 2008

SELECT YEAR(GETDATE()) as "Year";

Question 11 : Write SQL Query to find duplicate rows in a database? and then write
SQL query to delete them?
Answer : You can use following query to select distinct records :

SELECT * FROM emp a WHERE rowid = (SELECT MAX(rowid) FROM EMP b WHERE
a.empno=b.empno)

to Delete:

DELETE FROM emp a WHERE rowid != (SELECT MAX(rowid) FROM emp b WHERE
a.empno=b.empno);

Question 12 : There is a table which contains two column Student and Marks, you need
to find all the students, whose marks are greater than average marks i.e. list of above
average students.
Answer : This query can be written using sub query as shown below :

SELECT student, marks from table where marks > SELECT AVG(marks) from
table)

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
Question 13 : How do you find all employees which are also manager? .
You have given an standard employee table with an additional column mgr_id, which
contains employee id of manager.

Answer : You need to know about self join to solve this problem. In Self Join, you can join
two instances of same table to find out additional details as shown below

SELECT e.name, m.name FROM Employee e, Employee m WHERE e.mgr_id =

m.emp_id;

this will show employee name and manger name in two column e.g.

name manager_name
John David

One follow-up is to modify this query to include employees which doesn't have manager. To
solve that, instead of using inner join, just use left outer join, this will also include employees
without managers.

Question 14 : You have a composite index of three columns, and you only provide value
of two columns in WHERE clause of a select query? Will Index be used for this
operation? For example if Index is on EmpId, EmpFirstName and EmpSecondName
and you write query like

SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE EmpId=2 and EmpFirstName='Radhe'

If the given two columns are secondary index column then index will not invoke, but if the
given 2 columns contain primary index(first col while creating index) then index will invoke.
In this case Index will be used because EmpId and EmpFirstName are primary columns.

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What is the difference between inner and outer join?

Explain with example.
Inner Join

Inner join is the most common type of Join which is used to combine the rows from two
tables and create a result set containing only such records that are present in both the tables
based on the joining condition (predicate).

Inner join returns rows when there is at least one match in both tables

If none of the record matches between two tables, then INNER JOIN will return a NULL set.
Below is an example of INNER JOIN and the resulting set.

SELECT dept.name DEPARTMENT, emp.name EMPLOYEE

FROM DEPT dept, EMPLOYEE emp
WHERE emp.dept_id = dept.id

Outer Join

Outer Join, on the other hand, will return matching rows from both tables as well as any
unmatched rows from one or both the tables (based on whether it is single outer or full outer
join respectively).

Outer Join can be full outer or single outer

Notice in our record set that there is no employee in the department 5 (Logistics). Because of
this if we perform inner join, then Department 5 does not appear in the above result. However
in the below query we perform an outer join (dept left outer join emp), and we can see this
department.

SELECT dept.name DEPARTMENT, emp.name EMPLOYEE

FROM DEPT dept, EMPLOYEE emp
WHERE dept.id = emp.dept_id (+)

The (+) sign on the emp side of the predicate indicates that emp is the outer table here. The
above SQL can be alternatively written as below (will yield the same result as above):

SELECT dept.name DEPARTMENT, emp.name EMPLOYEE

FROM DEPT dept LEFT OUTER JOIN EMPLOYEE emp
ON dept.id = emp.dept_id

What is the difference between JOIN and UNION?

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
SQL JOIN allows us to “lookup” records on other table based on the given conditions
between two tables. For example, if we have the department ID of each employee, then we
can use this department ID of the employee table to join with the department ID of
department table to lookup department names.

UNION operation allows us to add 2 similar data sets to create resulting data set that contains
all the data from the source data sets. Union does not require any condition for joining. For
example, if you have 2 employee tables with same structure, you can UNION them to create
one result set that will contain all the employees from both of the tables.

SELECT * FROM EMP1

UNION
SELECT * FROM EMP2;

What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL?

UNION and UNION ALL both unify for add two structurally similar data sets, but UNION
operation returns only the unique records from the resulting data set whereas UNION ALL
will return all the rows, even if one or more rows are duplicated to each other.

In the following example, I am choosing exactly the same employee from the emp table and
performing UNION and UNION ALL. Check the difference in the result.

SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 5

UNION ALL
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 5
ID MGR_I DEPT_ID NAM SAL DOJ
D E
5.0 2.0 2.0 Anno 80.0 01-Feb-2012
5.0 2.0 2.0 Anno 80.0 01-Feb-2012
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 5
UNION
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 5
ID MGR_I DEPT_ID NAM SAL DOJ
D E
5.0 2.0 2.0 Anno 80.0 01-Feb-2012

What is the difference between WHERE clause and

HAVING clause?
WHERE and HAVING both filters out records based on one or more conditions. The
difference is, WHERE clause can only be applied on a static non-aggregated column whereas
we will need to use HAVING for aggregated columns.

To understand this, consider this example.

Suppose we want to see only those departments where department ID is greater than 3. There
is no aggregation operation and the condition needs to be applied on a static field. We will
use WHERE clause here:

SELECT * FROM DEPT WHERE ID > 3

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
ID NAME

4 Sales

5 Logistics

Next, suppose we want to see only those Departments where Average salary is greater than
80. Here the condition is associated with a non-static aggregated information which is
“average of salary”. We will need to use HAVING clause here:

SELECT dept.name DEPARTMENT, avg(emp.sal) AVG_SAL

FROM DEPT dept, EMPLOYEE emp
WHERE dept.id = emp.dept_id (+)
GROUP BY dept.name
HAVING AVG(emp.sal) > 80
DEPARTMENT AVG_SAL

Engineering 90

As you see above, there is only one department (Engineering) where average salary of
employees is greater than 80.

What is the difference among UNION, MINUS and

INTERSECT?
UNION combines the results from 2 tables and eliminates duplicate records from the result
set.

MINUS operator when used between 2 tables, gives us all the rows from the first table except
the rows which are present in the second table.

INTERSECT operator returns us only the matching or common rows between 2 result sets.

To understand these operators, let’s see some examples. We will use two different queries to
extract data from our emp table and then we will perform UNION, MINUS and INTERSECT
operations on these two sets of data.

UNION
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 5
UNION
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID = 6
I MGR_ID DEPT_ID NAME SAL DOJ
D
5 2 2.0 Anno 80.0 01-Feb-2012
6 2 2.0 Darl 80.0 11-Feb-2012

MINUS
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE
MINUS

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID > 2
I MGR_ID DEPT_ID NAM SAL DOJ
D E
1 2 Hash 100.0 01-Jan-2012
2 1 2 Robo 100.0 01-Jan-2012

INTERSECT
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID IN (2, 3, 5)
INTERSECT
SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE ID IN (1, 2, 4, 5)
I MGR_ID DEPT_I NAME SAL DOJ
D D
5 2 2 Anno 80.0 01-Feb-2012
2 1 2 Robo 100.0 01-Jan-2012

What is Self Join and why is it required?

Self Join is the act of joining one table with itself.

Self Join is often very useful to convert a hierarchical structure into a flat structure

In our employee table example above, we have kept the manager ID of each employee in the
same row as that of the employee. This is an example of how a hierarchy (in this case
employee-manager hierarchy) is stored in the RDBMS table. Now, suppose if we need to
print out the names of the manager of each employee right beside the employee, we can use
self join. See the example below:

SELECT e.name EMPLOYEE, m.name MANAGER

FROM EMPLOYEE e, EMPLOYEE m
WHERE e.mgr_id = m.id (+)
EMPLOYE MANAGER
E
Pete Hash
Darl Hash
Inno Hash
Robo Hash
Tomiti Robo
Anno Robo
Privy Robo
Meme Pete
Bhuti Tomiti
Hash

The only reason we have performed a left outer join here (instead of INNER JOIN) is we
have one employee in this table without a manager (employee ID = 1). If we perform inner
join, this employee will not show-up.

How can we transpose a table using SQL (changing rows

to column or vice-versa) ?
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The usual way to do it in SQL is to use CASE statement or DECODE statement.

How to generate row number in SQL Without ROWNUM

Generating a row number – that is a running sequence of numbers for each row is not easy
using plain SQL. In fact, the method I am going to show below is not very generic either.
This method only works if there is at least one unique column in the table. This method will
also work if there is no single unique column, but collection of columns that is unique.
Anyway, here is the query:

SELECT name, sal, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM EMPLOYEE i WHERE o.name >= i.name)
row_num
FROM EMPLOYEE o
order by row_num
NAME SAL ROW_NUM
Anno 80 1
Bhuti 60 2
Darl 80 3
Hash 100 4
Inno 50 5
Mem 60 6
e
Pete 70 7
Privy 50 8
Robo 100 9
Tomiti 70 10

The column that is used in the row number generation logic is called “sort key”. Here sort
key is “name” column. For this technique to work, the sort key needs to be unique. We have
chosen the column “name” because this column happened to be unique in our Employee
table. If it was not unique but some other collection of columns was, then we could have used
those columns as our sort key (by concatenating those columns to form a single sort key).

Also notice how the rows are sorted in the result set. We have done an explicit sorting on the
row_num column, which gives us all the row numbers in the sorted order. But notice that
name column is also sorted (which is probably the reason why this column is referred as sort-
key). If you want to change the order of the sorting from ascending to descending, you will
need to change “>=” sign to “<=” in the query.

As I said before, this method is not very generic. This is why many databases already
implement other methods to achieve this. For example, in Oracle database, every SQL result
set contains a hidden column called ROWNUM. We can just explicitly select ROWNUM to
get sequence numbers.

How to select first 5 records from a table?

This question, often asked in many interviews, does not make any sense to me. The problem
here is how do you define which record is first and which is second. Which record is
retrieved first from the database is not deterministic. It depends on many uncontrollable

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
factors such as how database works at that moment of execution etc. So the question should
really be – “how to select any 5 records from the table?” But whatever it is, here is the
solution:

In Oracle,

SELECT *
FROM EMP
WHERE ROWNUM <= 5;

In SQL Server,

SELECT TOP 5 * FROM EMP;

Generic solution,

I believe a generic solution can be devised for this problem if and only if there exists at least
one distinct column in the table. For example, in our EMP table ID is distinct. We can use
that distinct column in the below way to come up with a generic solution of this question that
does not require database specific functions such as ROWNUM, TOP etc.

SELECT name
FROM EMPLOYEE o
WHERE (SELECT count(*) FROM EMPLOYEE i WHERE i.name < o.name) < 5
name
Inno
Anno
Darl
Meme
Bhuti

I have taken “name” column in the above example since “name” is happened to be unique in
this table. I could very well take ID column as well.

In this example, if the chosen column was not distinct, we would have got more than 5
records returned in our output.

Do you have a better solution to this problem? If yes, post your solution in the comment.

What is the difference between ROWNUM pseudo column

and ROW_NUMBER() function?
ROWNUM is a pseudo column present in Oracle database returned result set prior to
ORDER BY being evaluated. So ORDER BY ROWNUM does not work.

ROW_NUMBER() is an analytical function which is used in conjunction to OVER() clause

wherein we can specify ORDER BY and also PARTITION BY columns.

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Suppose if you want to generate the row numbers in the order of ascending employee salaries
for example, ROWNUM will not work. But you may use ROW_NUMBER() OVER() like
shown below:

SELECT name, sal, row_number() over(order by sal desc) rownum_by_sal

FROM EMPLOYEE o
name Sal ROWNUM_BY_SAL
Hash 10 1
0
Robo 10 2
0
Anno 80 3
Darl 80 4
Tomiti 70 5
Pete 70 6
Bhuti 60 7
Meme 60 8
Inno 50 9
Privy 50 10

What are the differences among ROWNUM, RANK and DENSE_RANK?

ROW_NUMBER assigns contiguous, unique numbers from 1.. N to a result set.

RANK does not assign unique numbers—nor does it assign contiguous numbers. If two
records tie for second place, no record will be assigned the 3rd rank as no one came in third,
according to RANK. See below:

SELECT name, sal, rank() over(order by sal desc) rank_by_sal

FROM EMPLOYEE o
name Sal RANK_BY_SAL
Hash 100 1
Robo 100 1
Anno 80 3
Darl 80 3
Tomiti 70 5
Pete 70 5
Bhuti 60 7
Mem 60 7
e
Inno 50 9
Privy 50 9

DENSE_RANK, like RANK, does not assign unique numbers, but it does assign contiguous
numbers. Even though two records tied for second place, there is a third-place record. See
below:

SELECT name, sal, dense_rank() over(order by sal desc) dense_rank_by_sal

FROM EMPLOYEE o
name Sal DENSE_RANK_BY_SAL

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 Interview Questions “DABASE” 2015
Hash 100 1
Robo 100 1
Anno 80 2
Darl 80 2
Tomiti 70 3
Pete 70 3
Bhuti 60 4
Meme 60 4
Inno 50 5
Privy 50 5

Stored Procedure:

Stored Procedure in SQL Server can be defined as the set of logical group of SQL statements
which are grouped to perform a specific task. There are many benefits of using a stored
procedure. The main benefit of using a stored procedure is that it increases the performance
of the database.The other benefits of using the Stored Procedure are given below.

Benefits of Using the Stored Procedure

1. One of the main benefits of using the Stored procedure is that it reduces the amount of
information sent to the database server. It can become a more important benefit when
the bandwidth of the network is less. Since if we send the SQL query (statement)
which is executing in a loop to the server through network and the network gets
disconnected, then the execution of the SQL statement doesn't return the expected
results, if the SQL query is not used between Transaction statement and rollback
statement is not used.
2. Compilation step is required only once when the stored procedure is created. Then
after it does not require recompilation before executing unless it is modified and
reutilizes the same execution plan whereas the SQL statements need to be compiled
every time whenever it is sent for execution even if we send the same SQL statement
every time.
3. It helps in re usability of the SQL code because it can be used by multiple users and
by multiple clients since we need to just call the stored procedure instead of writing
the same SQL statement every time. It helps in reducing the development time.
4. Stored procedure is helpful in enhancing the security since we can grant permission to
the user for executing the Stored procedure instead of giving permission on the tables
used in the Stored procedure.
5. Sometimes, it is useful to use the database for storing the business logic in the form of
stored procedure since it makes it secure and if any change is needed in the business
logic, then we may only need to make changes in the stored procedure and not in the
files contained on the web server.

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