Data Gyan 30 SQL interview questions and answers

Table 1: – EmployeeDetails

EmpId FullName ManagerId DateOfJoining

121 Priya Batra 321 01/31/2017

321 Salman Khan 986 01/30/2016

421 Kuldeep Rana 876 27/11/2019

Table 2: – EmployeeSalary

EmpId Project Salary

121 P1 9000
321 P2 7000
421 P1 15000

1.Write a SQL query to fetch the count of employees working in project ‘P1’.
Ans: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM EmployeeSalary WHERE Project = 'P1';
2.Write a SQL query to fetch employee names having a salary greater than or equal to
5000 and less than or equal 10000.

Ans: SELECT FullName FROM EmployeeDetails WHERE EmpId IN

(SELECT EmpId FROM EmpolyeeSalary WHERE Salary BETWEEN 5000 AND 10000);
3. Write a SQL query to fetch project-wise count of employees sorted by project’s count
in descending order.

Ans: SELECT Project, count(EmpId) EmpProjectCount FROM EmployeeSalary

GROUP BY Project ORDER BY EmpProjectCount DESC;

4. Write a query to fetch only the first name(string before space) from the FullName
column of EmployeeDetails table.

Ans: SELECT SUBSTRING(FullName, 0, CHARINDEX(' ',FullName)) FROM EmployeeDetails;

Or
SELECT LEFT(FullName, CHARINDEX(' ',FullName) - 1) FROM EmployeeDetails;
5. Write a query to fetch employee names and salary records. Return employee details
even if the salary record is not present for the employee.
Ans: SELECT E.FullName, S.Salary FROM EmployeeDetails E LEFT JOIN EmployeeSalary S

ON E.EmpId = S.EmpId;
6.Write a SQL query to fetch all the Employees who are also managers from
EmployeeDetails table.
Note: Here, we must use Self-Join as the requirement wants us to analyze the EmployeeDetails table as two
different tables, each for Employee and manager records.

Ans:SELECT DISTINCT E.FullName FROM EmpDetails E INNER JOIN EmpDetails M ON E.EmpID = M.ManagerID;

7. Write a SQL query to fetch all employee records from EmployeeDetails table who have
a salary record in EmployeeSalary table.
Note: The EXISTS condition in SQL is used to check whether the result of a correlated nested query is empty
(contains no tuples) or not. The result of EXISTS is a Boolean value True or False. It can be used in a SELECT,
UPDATE, INSERT or DELETE statement.

Ans: SELECT * FROM EmployeeDetails E

WHERE EXISTS
(SELECT * FROM EmployeeSalary S WHERE E.EmpId = S.EmpId);
8. Write a SQL query to fetch duplicate records from a table.

Ans: SELECT EmpId, Project, Salary, COUNT(*)FROM EmployeeSalary

GROUP BY EmpId, Project, Salary HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;

9. Write a SQL query to remove duplicates from a table without using a temporary table.

DELETE FROM EmployeeSalary

WHERE rowid NOT IN(SELECT MAX(rowid) FROM EmployeeSalary GROUP BY EmpId);
Note: Using rowId
10. Write a SQL query to fetch only odd rows from the table.
Ans. This can be achieved by using Row_number in SQL server-
SELECT E.EmpId, E.Project, E.Salary
FROM (SELECT *, Row_Number() OVER(ORDER BY EmpId) AS RowNumber
FROM EmployeeSalary) E WHERE E.RowNumber % 2 = 1
11. Write a SQL query to fetch only even rows from the table.
Ans. Using the same Row_Number() and checking that the remainder when divided by 2 is 0-
SELECT E.EmpId, E.Project, E.Salary FROM (SELECT *, Row_Number() OVER(ORDER BY EmpId) AS RowNumber
FROM EmployeeSalary ) E WHERE E.RowNumber % 2 = 0
12. Write a SQL query to create a new table with data and structure copied from another
table.
Ans. Using SELECT INTO command-

SELECT * INTO newTable FROM EmployeeDetails;

13. Write a SQL query to create an empty table with the same structure as some other
table.
Ans: SELECT * INTO newTable FROM EmployeeDetails WHERE 1 = 0;
14. Write a SQL query to fetch common records between two tables.

SELECT * FROM EmployeeSalary

INTERSECT
SELECT * FROM ManagerSalary
15. Write a SQL query to fetch records that present in one table but not in another table.

SELECT * FROM EmployeeSalary

MINUS
SELECT * FROM ManagerSalary
16. Write a SQL query to find the current date-time.

SELECT getdate();
17. Write a SQL query to fetch all the Employees details from EmployeeDetails table who
joined in the Year 2016.

SELECT * FROM EmployeeDetails WHERE DateOfJoining BETWEEN '01-01-2016'

AND date '31-12-2016';
18. Write SQL query to find the nth highest salary from table.

SELECT TOP 1 Salary FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT TOP N Salary FROM Employee
ORDER BY Salary DESC )ORDER BY Salary ASC
19. Write SQL query to find the 3rd highest salary from table without using TOP/limit
keyword.

SELECT Salary FROM EmployeeSalary Emp1

WHERE 2 = (SELECT COUNT( DISTINCT ( Emp2.Salary ) )
FROM EmployeeSalary Emp2 WHERE Emp2.Salary > Emp1.Salary)
20. What is the differences Between Primary key and Unique key:
Primary key is uniquely identifies a single row in the table but not allowed null values.
Unique key is uniquely identifies a single row in the table but allowed null values.
21.What is the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE statements?
Ans:
Delete command is used to delete a row in a table.
Truncate is used to delete all the rows from a table.
22.What is the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR2 datatype in SQL?

Both Char and Varchar2 are used for characters datatype but varchar2 is used for character
strings of variable length whereas Char is used for strings of fixed length.
23.What is a Foreign key?

A foreign key is a key used to link two tables together. This is sometimes also called as a
referencing key.
24. What is Index? What is the difference between clustered and non clustered index ?
Indexes are used to retrieve data from the database more quickly. Indexes are special lookup
tables that the database search engine can use to speed up data retrieval.
Clustered index is used for easy retrieval of data from the database and its faster whereas
reading from non clustered index is relatively slower.

25.Are NULL values same as that of zero or a blank space?

A NULL value is not at all same as that of zero or a blank space. NULL value represents a value
which is unavailable, unknown, assigned or not applicable whereas a zero is a number and blank
space is a character

26.What is the difference between cross join and natural join?

The cross join produces the cross product or Cartesian product of two tables whereas the natural
join is based on all the columns having the same name and data types in both the tables.

27.What is a View?

A view is a virtual table which consists of a subset of data contained in a table. Since views are
not present, it takes less space to store. View can have data of one or more tables combined and
it depends on the relationship.

28.What is Normalization and what are the advantages of it?

Normalization is the process of organizing data to avoid duplication and redundancy.

29.State the differences between HAVING and WHERE clauses.

30. Explain the difference between OLTP and OLAP.