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SQL Interview Questions

The document discusses various SQL concepts including how to find the second highest salary, differences between UNION and UNION ALL, primary and unique keys, primary and foreign keys, TRUNCATE vs DELETE, and methods to find duplicate records in a database. It highlights the pros and cons of SQL queries and commands, emphasizing performance and data integrity. Additionally, it provides example SQL queries for practical understanding.

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29 views4 pages

SQL Interview Questions

The document discusses various SQL concepts including how to find the second highest salary, differences between UNION and UNION ALL, primary and unique keys, primary and foreign keys, TRUNCATE vs DELETE, and methods to find duplicate records in a database. It highlights the pros and cons of SQL queries and commands, emphasizing performance and data integrity. Additionally, it provides example SQL queries for practical understanding.

Uploaded by

swoobhai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1. SQL Query to find second highest salary of Employee.

SELECT name, salary FROM employees e1 WHERE 2-1 = (SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT salary) FROM

employees e2 WHERE e2.salary > e1.salary)

Pros:

The generic solution works in all database including Oracle, MySQL, SQL SERVER and

PostgreSQL.

Cons:

Slow, because the inner query will run for every row processed by the outer query.

2. Difference between UNION and UNION ALL

1. The main difference between them is that UNION doesn't include duplicate record but

UNION ALL does. Since you mostly don't want duplicate rows, UNION is preferred

over UNION ALL in reporting and application development. By the way, you should keep

in mind that UNION ALL performance better than UNION because it doesn't have to

remove duplicate, so no extra work.

2. Another difference between them is that UNION ALL is faster than UNION but may look

slow because it returns more data which takes more time to travel via the network.

Select emp_id, emp_name from employee;

UNION/UNION ALL

Select cus_id, cus_name from Customer;


In order to combine results of two queries, they must contain same number of columns.

For example if one query contains 3 columns and other contains 4 columns then you can

not use UNION or UNION ALL.

3. Difference between Primary key and Unique key

1. Unique key in a table can be null, at-least one but primary key can not be null in any

table in relation database like MySQL , Oracle etc.

2. There can be only one primary key per table in relation database e.g. MySQL, Oracle or

Sybase but there can be more than one unique key per table.

3. Primary Key is used to identify a row (record) in a table whereas Unique-key is to

prevent duplicate values in a column.

4. Difference between Primary and Foreign key

1. The primary key is unique in the table. So a table cannot contain more than one row

with the same primary key, but that's not required for foreign key. You can have more

than one rows in a table with same foreign key.

2. Foreign key helps to maintain the integrity of related tables in the database. For

example, it's not possible to delete a department, unless a single employee is referring

that. So, an accidental delete of such department will be prevented by database

management systems.

5. TRUNCATE vs DELETE in SQL

1. The first and most important difference between TRUNCATE and DELETE command in

SQL is that truncate doesn't log row level details while delete is logged. Since TRUNCATE

is not logged, it's not possible to rollback it e.g. in Oracle. But some database may
provide rollback functionality for truncate, on the other hand, DELETE is always logged

and can be rolled back.

2. Due to above reason, TRUNCATE command is much faster than DELETE, and due to

same reason, you should not use DELETE to remove large data set, since every delete

operation is logged, it may be possible that your log segment gets filled and blew up, if

you try to empty a large table using DELETE command.

3. Truncate is usually used to remove all data from tables e.g. in order to empty a

particular table and you can define any filter based upon WHERE clause, but with

DELETE, you can define the condition in WHERE clause for removing data from tables.

4. Since TRUNCATE is a DDL operation, it's automatically get committed, on the other

hand, DELETE is not auto commit.

5. DELETE command work at row level and acquire the row level lock while TRUNCATE

locks the whole table, instead of individual rows.

6. How to find duplicate records in a table on database

Problem of duplicates in database arise when you don't have a primary key or unique key on

database. Anyway its easy to find duplicate records in table by using group by clause of ANSI

SQL. Group by clause is used to group data based upon any column or a number of columns.

Once you have grouped data you can filter out duplicates by using having clause. Having clause

is counter part of where clause for aggregation queries.

Following SELECT query will only find duplicates records based on name

select name, count(name) from contacts group by name;


name | count(name) |
+-------+-------------+
| Harry | 4 |
| James | 4 |

This is the correct way of finding duplicate contacts at it look both name and phone number

select name, count(name) from contacts group by name, phone;

having clause in SQL query will filter duplicate records from non duplicate records.

select name, count(name) as times from contacts group by name,

phone having times>1;

7.

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