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Interview Questions

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komal145

Posted Tuesday, December 04, 2012 8:32 AM

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Hi..I had an interview and had few questions:

Can anyone please help me finding out answers for the below questions?

1) Design table to track phone?
2) how to troubleshoot high volume data?
3)How to identify performance issues.
4)Which statement is running slow, how to find it.
5) How to Optimize stored procedures ?
6)Suppose I hv 3 SP. SP A, SP B and SP C. SP A calls SP B and SP B calls SP C. If there is a problem with SP C then how we gonna use TRY and CATCH?

Thanks,
komal

Post #1392541

Sean Lange

Posted Tuesday, December 04, 2012 8:39 AM

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Questions 1 and 5 do not have enough details to provide an answer. I would be asking for a lot of clarity about what those mean. 2, 3 and 4 are not questions that have an answer. They are intended to start a discussion about how to do those things. This is more of a role playing technique than anything else. If you can discuss a number of things you would do that is what they are after. Of all of those I find the "how do you optimize a procedure" to be the most outlandish of them all. The interviewer wants to see if you know that the question is loaded. There is not a formula for this. It is more of an art than a science. Optimizing queries takes the culmination of all your knowledge in one location. Even worse is that you might optimize a query today and in a year you go back and realize a number of improvements you could make because you have learned new things.

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Post #1392551

ravulas2007

Posted Tuesday, December 04, 2012 9:26 AM

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design table to track phone? Hehe

what kind of question is that?

Post #1392572

komal145

Posted Tuesday, December 04, 2012 9:59 AM

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Sorry the questions is like this: Design a table, how to track phone call.

Post #1392594

Sean Lange

Posted Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:17 AM

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komal145 (12/4/2012)

Sorry the questions is like this: Design a table, how to track phone call.

I stand by my comment that this entirely too vague to provide an answer. What does that mean? Do you want to know from the perspective of a cell phone provider? billing? etc. Track what? Do you need to know which towers the calls is handled from? Do you need to know the total time spent on a given providers network? Or do you want to track a phone call from the perspective of one end of the phone call. Maybe from the perspective of a amusement park you want to track the phone call so you can monitor traffic flow of pedestrians. Maybe you just want to know the number called and the call duration. See my point?

_______________________________________________________________

Need help? Help us help you.

Read the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/ for best practices on asking questions.

Need to split a string? Try Jeff Moden's splitter.

Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 1 – Converting Rows to Columns
Cross Tabs and Pivots, Part 2 - Dynamic Cross Tabs

Post #1392604

Your Name Here

Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2012 6:26 AM

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Sorry to be a bit off-topic but this thread flashed me back to an interview I had years ago. The 'technical' questions about troubleshooting were surprisingly specific and detailed. After more than a few - all along the same basic problem - I stopped the interview and asked why all the questions centered around one type of issue. After a few moments of dead air, they finally admitted they had a problem with one of their production databases and was looking for ways to fix it.

I left shortly after.

Post #1392967

rhythm.varshney

Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2012 6:44 AM

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komal145 (12/4/2012)

Hi..I had an interview and had few questions:

Can anyone please help me finding out answers for the below questions?

1) Design table to track phone?

It totally deppends on the business requirements means what data they want to store.

2) how to troubleshoot high volume data?
3)How to identify performance issues.
4)Which statement is running slow, how to find it.
5) How to Optimize stored procedures ?

For above question as Sean suggested these are topic for discussion and you can find out lot of articles on little google search.

6)Suppose I hv 3 SP. SP A, SP B and SP C. SP A calls SP B and SP B calls SP C. If there is a problem with SP C then how we gonna use TRY and CATCH?
Thanks,
komal

May be I did not understand the question because what does mean how to use TRY and CATCH or what is the relation of having child procs with TRY-CATCH.

Post #1392982

Alan.B

Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2012 6:54 AM

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Your Name Here (12/5/2012)

That is a great story. Hilarious! Its a shame that they wasted your time but you got a good story out of it.

-- AJB
xmlsqlninja.com

Post #1392989

toddasd

Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2012 7:10 AM

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Alan.B (12/5/2012)

Your Name Here (12/5/2012)

That is a great story. Hilarious! Its a shame that they wasted your time but you got a good story out of it.

I can hear the IT manager yelling down the hall, "Hey Bob, we have another issue on the production database, schedule some more interviews!"

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Post #1392998

Jeff Moden

Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2012 7:20 AM

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komal145 (12/4/2012)

These are questions that have a very broad scope and are part of the basic skill set required of the person holding the Role of "DBA". They don't have simple answers and they require actual experience doing all of those things. I apologize for the way this is going to sound, but if you can't answer these questions, then you're simply not ready to be a DBA.

Use this as an opportunity to become ready to be a DBA. Buy a copy of the "Developer Edition" and use the questions above as a part of your study guide. Books Online and Google should become close friends. Once you dig into the complexity of how to do the things in the questions you've been asked, you'll understand why it would be difficult for someone on this forum to answer all of your questions to your satisfaction because it would involve the long process of actually teaching you how to be a good DBA.

You should also Google for what a DBA actually is responsible for by searching for DBA job descriptions. Whether you pursue getting certified or not is up to you but the certification books identified by Microsoft are pretty good teaching tools so you might want to invest in a couple of those, as well. Google for Microsoft Certification SQL Server to find more information on those.

Last, but not least, don't expect free love on these types of questions. Like I said, they form a part of the very backbone of becoming a DBA. Becoming a real DBA isn't easy. It's going to take a lot of work on your part. If you believe that you'll enjoy the job and the sometimes very long hours and taking "the heat" when something goes wrong, then it'll all be worthwhile. Just don't expect it to happen overnight because there's a lot to it. You should probably aim first at being an SQL Server Developer and get really good at T-SQL, indexes, and have a really good grasp on all of the idfferent types of objects.

--Jeff Moden

"RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for "Row-By-Agonizing-Row".

First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
Stop thinking about what you want to do to a row... think, instead, of what you want to do to a column."

For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

For better answers on performance questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral/66909/

Post #1393000

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