************ TECHNICAL QUESTIONS ******************

1) WHAT IS DBMS?
Database management system (DBMS) consists of a collection of interrelated data a set of
programs that allow users to access and modify these data. The collection of data, usually referred to as
the database, contains information about one particular enterprise. the primary goal of a DBMS is to
provide an environment that is both convenient and efficient to use in retrieving and storing database
information.
Disadvantages of typical file processing system are:
Data Redundancy and inconsistency
Difficulty in accessing data.
Data isolation
Concurrent access anomalies
Security problems
Integrity problems
DATA ABSTRACTION: Major purpose of a data base system is to provide users with an abstract view of
the data. That is, the system hides certain details of how the data is stored and maintained. This is
accomplished by defining three levels of abstraction at which the database may be viewed: the physical
level, the conceptual level, and the view level.
Physical level: the lowest level of abstraction describes how the data are actually stored. At the physical
level, complex low-level data structures are described in detail.
Conceptual level: this describes what data are actually stored in the database, and the relationships that
exist among the data. The conceptual level of abstraction is used by database administrators, who must
decide what information is to be kept in the database.
View level: the highest level of abstraction describes only part of the entire database. Despite the use of
simpler structures at the conceptual level, some complexity remains because of the large size of the
database. Many users of the database system will not be concerned with all of this information. Instead,
such users need only a part of the database. To simplify their interaction with the system, the view level of
abstraction is defined. The system may provide many views for the same database.
DATA MODELS: data model is a collection of conceptual tools for describing data, data relationships, data
semantics, and consistency constraints. The various data models fall into three groups: object-based
logical models, record-based logical models, and physical data models.
Object-based logical models are used in describing data at the conceptual and view levels. They are
characterized by the fact that they provide fairly flexible structuring capabilities and allow data constraints
to be specified explicitly. Some of the more widely known ones are:
The entity-relationship model: entity-relationship (E-R) data model is base on a perception of a real world,
which consists of a collection of basic objects called entities, and relationships among these objects. An
entity is an object that is distinguishable from other objects by a specific set of attributes. A relationship is
an association among several entities. The set of all entities of the same type are termed as entity set and
the set of all relationships of the same type are termed as relationship set.

The object-oriented model: the object-oriented model is based on a collection of objects. An object
contains values stored in instance variables within the objects. Unlike the record-oriented models, these
values are themselves objects. Thus, objects contain objects to an arbitrarily deep level of nesting. An
object also contains bodies of code that operate on the object. These bodies of code are called methods.
Objects that contain the same types of values and the same methods are grouped together into classes.
A class may be viewed as a type definition for objects. This combination of data and code into a type
definition is similar to the programming language concept of abstract data types.
The binary model:
The semantic data model:
The infological model:
The functional data model:

Record-Based Logical Models:

Record-based logical models are used in describing data at the conceptual and view levels. They are
used both to specify the overall logical structure of the database and to provide a higher-level description
of the implementation.
Record based models are so named because the database is structured in fixed-format records of several
types. Each record type defines a fixed number of fields, or attributes, and each field is usually of fixed
length. The three most widely accepted data models are the relational, network and hierarchical models.
The relational model represents data and relationships among data by a collection of tables, each of
which has a number of columns with unique names.
Data in the network model are represented by collections of records and relationships among data are
represented by links, which can be viewed as pointers. The records in the database are organized as
collections of arbitrary graphs.
The hierarchical model is similar to the network model in the sense that data and relationships among
data are represented by records and links, respectively. It differs from the network model in that the
records are organized as collections of trees rather than arbitrary graphs.

Physical data models:

Physical data models are used to describe data at the lowest level. In contrast to logical data models,
there are very few physical data models in use. Two of the widely known ones are:
Unifying model
Frame memory.

Databases change over time as information is inserted and deleted. The collection of information stored in
the database at a particular moment in time is called an instance of the database. The overall design of
the database is called the database scheme.

Data independence:
The ability to modify a scheme definition in one level without affecting a scheme definition in the next
higher level is called data independence. There are two levels of data independence:
Physical data independence is the ability to modify the physical scheme without causing application
programs to be rewritten. Modifications at the physical level are occasionally necessary in order to
improve performance.
Logical data independence is the ability to modify the conceptual scheme without causing application
programs to be rewritten. Modifications at the conceptual level are necessary whenever the logical
structure of the database is altered.
Logical data independence is more difficult to achieve than physical data independence since application
programs are heavily dependent on the logical structure of the data they access.

Data definition language: a database scheme is specified by a set of definitions, which are expressed by
a special language called a data definition language (DDL). The result of compilation of DDL statements
is a set of tables which are stored in special file called data dictionary (or directory).
A data dictionary is a file that contains metadata; that is, “data about data.” This file is consulted
before actual data is read or modified in the database system.
The storage structure and access methods used by the database system are specified by a set of
definitions in a special type of DDL called a data storage and definition language. The result of
compilation of these definitions is a set of instructions to specify the implementation details of the
database schemes which are usually hidden from the users.
A data manipulation language (DML) is a language that enables users to access or manipulate
data as organized by the appropriate data model. There are basically two types:
Procedural DMLs require a user to specify what data is needed and how to get it.
Nonprocedural DMLs require a user to specify what data is needed without specifying how to get it.
A query is a statement requesting the retrieval of information. The portion of a DML that involves
information retrieval is called a query language.

Data Base Manager:

A Database manager is a program module which provides the interface between the low-level data stored
in the database and the application programs and queries submitted to the system. The database
manager is responsible for the following tasks:
Interaction with the file manager
Integrity enforcement
Security enforcement
Backup and recovery
Concurrency control

Data Base Administrator

One of the main reasons for having database management systems is to have central control of both data
and programs accessing that data. The person having such central control over the system is called the
database administrator (DBA). The functions of the database administrator includes:
Scheme definitions
Storage structure and access method definition
Scheme and physical organization modification
Granting of authorization for data access
Integrity constraint specification

Database users:
A primary goal of a database system is to provide an environment for retrieving information from and
storing new information into the database. There are four different types of database system users,
differentiated by the way they expect to interact with the system.
Application programmers
Sophisticated users
Specialized users
Naïve users

2) WHAT IS SUPER KEY, PRIMARY KEY, SECONDARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY And COMPOSITE KEY?
A superkey is a set of one or more attributes, taken collectively, allow us to identify uniquely an
entity in the entity set.
The concept of a superkey is not sufficient for our purposes, since, a superkey may contain extraneous
attributes. If k is a superkey, then so is any superset of k. we are interested in superkeys for which no
proper subset is a superkey. Such minimal superkeys are called candidate keys.
The term primary key is used to denote a candidate key that is chosen by the database designer as the
principal means of identifying entities within an entity set.
If an entity does not have sufficient attributes to form a primary key then such entity set is termed as a
weak entity set. An entity set which has a primary key is termed as a strong entity set.
In order for a weak entity set to be meaningful, it must be part of a one-to-many relationship set. This
relationship set should have no descriptive attributes, since any required attributes can be associated with
the weak entity set. A member of a strong entity set is a dominant entity, while a member of a weak entity
set is a subordinate entity. Although a weak entity set does not have a primary key, we need a means of
distinguishing among all those entities in the entity set that depend on one particular strong entity. The
discriminator of a weak entity set is a set of attributes that allow this distinction to be made.
The primary key of a weak entity set is formed by the primary key of the strong entity set on which it is
existence-dependent, plus its discriminator.
Let R be a relationship set involving entity sets E1,E2,……….En. let primary-key(Ei) denote the
set of attributes which form the primary key for entity set Ei.

Suppose that R has no attributes , then the attributes describing individual relationships of the set R,
denoted by attribute(R), are
Primary-key(E1) U primary-key(E2) U. . .U primary-key(En)

In the case that R has descriptive attributes, say {a1,a2,…..am}, then the set attribute(R) consists of
Primary-key(E1) U. . .U primary-key(En) U {a1,a2,..am}
3) WHAT ARE DIFFERENT LOGICAL MODELS?
4) DIFFERENCES BETWEEN RELATIONAL MODELS, HIERARCHICAL MODELS, NETWORK
MODELS?
5) FEATURES OF DBMS?
6) DIFFERENT FILE ORGANIZATION?
7) DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDEXING AND HASHING?
8)EXPLAIN ABOUT INDEX TABLE AND HASH TABLE?
9) WHAT IS OPERATING SYSTEM?
10) WHAT IS A SEMAPHORE?
11) WHAT IS PROCESS OVERLOADING?
12) WHAT ARE DATASTRUCTURES?
13) WHAT IS A STACK, QUEUE, TREES, GRAPHS, DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEM, ADVANTAGES
AND DISADVANTAGES?
14) SORTINGS AND SEARCHINGS?
15) PRINCIPLES OF OOPS?
16) WHAT IS DATA ENCAPSULATION, POLYMORPHISM AND INHERITANCE?
17) WHAT IS MULTIPLE INHERITANCE?
18) WHAT ARE DIFFERENT ACCESS SPECIFIERS?
19) WHAT IS WATERFALL METHOD OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING?
20) WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT PHASE?
21) DATA FLOW DIAGRAMS?
22) COBOL- WHAT ARE SUBROUTINES?
23) HOW DO YOU LINK SUBROUTINES?
24) DIFFERENCES BETWEEN C AND C++?
25) DISADVANTAGES OF INHERITANCE?
26) CHARACTERISTICS OF OOP?
27) WHAT ARE CPU SCHEDULING ALGORITHMS?
28) UNIX USES WHICH SCHEDULING ALGORITHM?
29) WHAT IS A STORED PROCEDURE?
30) WHAT IS NORMALIZATION?
31) BOYCE CODD NORMAL FORM?
32) WHAT IS PURPOSE OF NORMALIZATION?
33) ENTITY RELATION DIAGRAM?
34) SPECIALIZATION AND GENERALIZATION?
35) LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION?
36) AGGREGATE FUNCTIONS IN ORACLE?
37) WHAT ARE OUTER JOINS, INNER JOINS,SEMI JOINS?
38) WHAT IS A DEAD LOCK, HOW TO AVOID IT?