Top 10 PL/SQL Developer Job Interview Questions to

Demonstrate Your Coding Skill

James Koopmann, jkoopmann@pinehorse.com

Understanding data structures, data types, and code fragments all play a very important
piece in understanding PL/SQL code. James Koopman helps you put these code
pieces together to better demonstrate your skill and foresight on that job interview.

Understanding data structures, data types, and code fragments (cursors, loops,
exception blocks, etc.), as well as others, all play a very important piece in
understanding PL/SQL code. However, when push comes to shove it is the putting
together of these pieces that separate the men from the boys (or girls from the women).
Putting code pieces together and forming an application/program is where skill and
foresight come into play. Clearly, I hope that we can discern code that is well structured
and maintainable from code that is nothing more than a hack job. This is where this set
of interview questions come from, helping you to get started thinking about answering
questions when asked about actual programming skills that are required when putting
together procedures, functions, packages, triggers, and object types. As always, please
just take this article as a jumping off place for you to investigate and practice for your
next interview.

1. Would you say you use modularization as a best practice when producing
PL/SQL code?

Of course, you will say yes as soon as you hear this question. Nevertheless, I, like
many others, have seen way too much spaghetti code in my life that the question begs
for an answer on why you do code this way, assuming you do. Just remind yourself that
with modularized code we are able to separate by task/function so that we can improve
things such as maintainability, reusability, readability, reliability, and actually enforce
boundaries between key programming components. I don't know how many times, but it
has been many, that I've separated components that were nothing more than a few
lines of code. Often times it is these few lines of code that allow me to drastically
simplify not only calls to those lines of code but also the components I'd broken them
out from.

2. What is the difference between a procedure and a function?

This is one of those questions that, depending on your interview, you may get right or
wrong depending on how you answer it. In the past, I've often stated that the difference
between a procedure and a function is that a procedure is a program that performs one
or more actions while a function's main purpose is to return a value. This is true but
since a procedure can also return (interestingly with a RETURN clause) values, there is
something else missing. The difference, that should get you some brownie points, is in
the way procedures and functions are called. A procedure is called as an executable
PL/SQL statement while a function is called like a PL/SQL expression. Consider the
following and you will see the difference.

Procedure call
BEGIN
raiseEmployeeSalary(7369, 200);
END;

Function call
BEGIN
employeeSalary := getEmployeeSalary(7369);
END;

3. Explain the difference between IN and OUT parameters.

An IN parameter allows us to pass values into PL/SQL code while the OUT parameter
allows us to pass values back out of PL/SQL code. Also, remember that a parameter
can be specified as both IN and OUT with the IN OUT declaration.

4. What is module overloading and why might you use it?

Overloading modules is nothing more than a mechanism that allows the coder to reuse
the same name for different programs that are within the same scope. Overloading is
probably one of my favorite mechanisms to share and increase usability within code.

5. Describe read consistency

It has been my experience that, while this is an easy concept, many fall short of
understanding it in practice. Read consistency is nothing more than Oracle's way of
quarantining that the data / result set you request at a specific time will be available until
the request is complete. This means that if I issue a SQL statement at 7:00am, and it
takes 10 minutes to produce the result set, and someone were to alter the data at
7:05am, the data I get back will look like it did at 7:00am as if no one had modified it.

6. What is an autonomous transaction and how does it affect the commit

process?

An autonomous transaction creates, when called from another transaction, an

independent and separate transaction that can issue commits without affecting the
calling transaction.

7. What are packages?

A package is nothing more than a way to consolidate/group/organize/etc., common

elements of PL/SQL code into a single named entity. While packages do help improve
things like portability and maintainability of code, packages can also help improve the
performance of the code.
8. How might you hide/protect your source code if distributed to customers?

Oracle's wrap utility provides a good way of hiding PL/SQL source code; protecting it
and making it difficult for others to view. You can either wrap source code with the wrap
utility or use the DBMS_DDL subprograms.

9. Name two PL/SQL conditional control statements.

Very easily, the conditional statements are the IF and the CASE statements.

10. Name two loop control statements.

The loop control statements consist of LOOP, FOR LOOP, and WHILE LOOP.

Conclusion

These top questions come to mind when I think about procedures, packages, functions,
and triggers. Clearly, there is much to know about these objects and you should dive
into the structures and usability of them within your coding practices. As always,
remember that these questions are not hard-n-fast questions. If I were the interviewer,
I'd most definitely jump off into additional real-world scenarios and see if the interviewee
had actually coded something. Sample code, if you can get it, is extremely important for
this section of an interview. Providing clear samples on how you have pieced together
code can be priceless. I'd even go so far as to suggest you create a PDF of your
favorite code to send along with resumes. Worst-case scenario would be they never
open the PDF, but, honestly, if I was performing the interview you'd get high marks; I'd
open it, and I'd assume you were confident in what you are doing.