Azure-Sql-Db

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Security Level: Advanced

Question:

You have a table named Sales.Customers that is owned by dbo. You also have a stored procedure named Sales.FindCustomers that searches the Sales.Customers table.

A user Terry is given permission to the procedure and can successfully execute the procedure.

2025-06-05

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Administrator Level: Medium

Question:

You have an ETL process that loads employee details into a table named Staging.Employees. The table has the following columns:

• EmployeeID (int)
• FullName (nvarchar(100))
• LoginName (varchar(100))

The table is a heap and has no primary key.

2025-06-01

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Medium

Question:

You are creating a view in a SQL Server based data warehouse.

You need to query transactions that include a TransactionDateTime column which uses the DateTime data type. The query is as follows:

2025-05-28

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Intro

Question:

You need to filter rows being returned by a query.

When should you use a HAVING clause rather than a WHERE clause?

Answer:

A WHERE clause is used to filter the rows from the source (usually a table).

2025-05-24

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Administrator Level: Medium

Question:

You are considering adding an index to a table.

You have heard that adding indexes slows down UPDATE commands.

Does adding an index always slow down updates? If so, why? If not, why not?

2025-05-20

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Intro

Question:

You need to extract the hour component from a datetime value.

Which function should you use?

Answer:

To do this in SQL Server, you should use the DATEPART function.

2025-05-12

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Intro

Question:

You have a table named HumanResources.Employees. Some employees are managers.

You want to join the table to itself to join employee rows with their manager rows.

What is required when you join a table to itself, that is not required for joining separate tables?

2025-05-10

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Intro

Question:

You are writing a function that needs to process UTF-8 data. It takes one input parameter named @ValueToProcess that varies in length.

Which data type should you use for the @ValueToProcess parameter?

Answer:

2025-05-08

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Medium

Question:

You have a value in a variable named @NewValue. The data type is varchar(20).

You want to check if the value in the string is an integer and could be cast to an integer.

2025-05-06

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Intro

Question:

You want to call a procedure that counts the number of customers in a particular city.

You use the following code:

DECLARE @NumberOfCustomers int;

EXEC dbo.GetNumberOfCustomers 
    @City = N'Brisbane', 
    @NumberOfCustomers = @NumberOfCustomers;

SELECT @NumberOfCustomers;

No matter which city name you pass in the code, the selected count is NULL.

2025-05-04