IST 359 Exam 1 Questions Review Activity

Unit 1

1. What is data, metadata and information?

Data:
2. What is a database management system? How is this different from a database?
3. What is application software?

Unit 2

4. What is the physical domain?

5. Why would you use varchar(30) versus varchar(MAX) versus char(5) as data types?
6. Why would you use int versus decimal versus bit as data types?
7. What is the logical domain?
8. What is a Null and how does the concept of required data relate to Nulls?
9. Explain what a candidate and primary key are. What is the difference between them?
10. What is a surrogate primary key? How do you know if a table has a surrogate primary key?
11. What is a foreign key? How do you know what the foreign key is in a table?
12. What is a check constraint and why do we need them?
13. What is entity integrity and why is it important?
14. What is referential integrity and why is it important?
15. What is a default constraint and what happens when you add a record that has a column with a default
constraint? What is a unique constraint?
16. What is a lookup table and why do we need them?

Unit 3

17. What are the class naming conventions and why is this important?
18. What is the difference between DML and DDL?
19. How do you create a table? What are the different parts of this command that are required and what
extra clauses can you add to the create statement?
20. How do you get rid of a table? Why is it important to be careful when you do this?
21. How do you change the metadata of a table?
22. How do you add a row of data to a table? What if you only want to add data to two columns in the table?
23. How do you change a misspelling in the data of a table?
24. How do you get rid of a row in a table?

Unit 4

25. What does the TOP clause do in a SELECT statement? What is a practical example of why would want to
use this?
26. How do you do arithmetic in a query and why would you want to do this?
27. What is aliasing and what are two different ways you can use it?
28. What is concatenation and why would you use it?
29. What can I do if i want to search for patterns of strings in my query?
30. What is a boolean (true/false) statement and what are two different SQL commands where boolean
statements are used?
31. What is distinct and what does it do in a query? Why would you want to use it?
32. What do Getdate(), Datediff(), Month() and Year() do and what are these called in SQL?
33. How do you make a single line comment in SQL? How do you make a multiline comment?