Management information system controls and solves the business problems of an organization.

These analyze other information systems by a group of methods that are humanly based or are supported by a decision support system. MIS combines business with tech to help people in proving relevant information which they need to do their jobs faster and smarter. I would like to list few important interview questions that are generally asked by an employer: 1. What duties does a manager of MIS perform?

The position of a manager of MIS is very responsible and challenging. He supervises the activities of MIS staff. His main job is to identify the crucial business issues and yield workable solutions. These solutions may include activities like enhancing the existing applications and installing new software packages. He also prepares and manages the MIS capital budgets. Providing good and efficient training to the staff members is also under his jurisdiction. 2. What qualifications do you have for this post?

Tell about your qualifications. A bachelors degree in Business Administration or in Computer Science is the pre requisite for this job. Tell about your working experience. You can also mention about your knowledge in system configuration, installation, administration and management. You should mention about your experience in supporting financial and administrative systems. 3. What challenges do you see for the job you are applying?

The question is very intelligent and same intelligence needs to be reciprocated here. Try to gain information about the organization through its website before hand. You can start your answer by saying that you have always loved taking challenging positions and the one that is offered really suits your criteria. You can tell that good and efficient decision making skills are the most important factor required for this responsible position. Also 4. add Did that any how time your you qualifications had any and problem experience qualify you your for own this skill.

implementing

solution?

Your previous experience is going to help you a lot while answering this question. You can tell about a major problem that occurred at your previous work area and how did you solve it. What approach you took and what was the reason that made you do that. Be confident in yourself and genuine with your answer. You can also tell about a common basic problem that generally occurs in this field and how you will approach to solve it. These are some of the interview questions that are generally asked in an interview of a MIS manager. All the best!

http://www.geekinterview.com/Interview-Questions/Oracle/Database-Administration http://sql-plsql.blogspot.com/2009/04/sql-interview-questions.html online interview A computer programmer is a specialized person who designs, writes and tests the

computer programs. They are responsible for writing code that runs on client as well as server side. He or she designs software programs through building logical work flow charts, the functionality of which is translated into one of several computer languages. A computer programmer is also called a software developer, software engineer, computer scientist, or software analyst. In this article I would mainly provide you some interview questions that are frequently asked to the computer programmer. Lets start with the first one. 1. What are linked list, binary tree, arrays, queues and strings? Well, it is one of the most frequently asked interview questions. The interviewer checks your basic knowledge and understanding through this question. Linked list, binary tree, arrays, queues and strings are the elementary topics of programming. One should have a good command on the language on which he or she is working. Just prepare a short and well organized answer to this question before appearing in front of the interviewer. 2. What is the difference between TCP and UDP? TCP stand for transmission control protocol and UDP stands for User datagram Protocol.TCP is a reliable and connection oriented protocol, if there has been any mistake then TCP resends the part that was corrupted whereas UDP is an unreliable and connection-less protocol. A TCP protocol sends the data in a serial manner but a UDP protocol does not sends the data in serial order. 3. What is the difference between calloc() and malloc() function? A calloc function allocates a block of memory for an array of elements of a certain size whereas a malloc function allocates bytes of memory and not blocks of memory like calloc. A malloc function returns a void pointer to the allocated space or NULL if there is insufficient memory available whereas a calloc function allocates an array in memory with elements initialized to 0 and returns a pointer to the allocated space. 4. State some sorting methods. There are various sorting techniques such as quick sort, merge sort, binary sort, radix sort etc. The quick sort algorithm works on divide and conquer rule. A merge sort algorithm works by considering the data to be sorted as a sequence of already-sorted lists and radix sort technique takes a list of integers and puts each element on a smaller list, depending on the value of its least significant byte. Well, these are some of the frequently asked interview questions. I am very sure my article would surely help you to answer the questions with great confidence.

Oracle developer is responsible for developing a database for the company. He is the main architect of the database management system of the organization. He modifies the project to suit the current needs. Hence a good knowledge

of SQL, PL/SQL with proficiency in Oracle is a must for this field. Gaining a certificate from an organization will help a lot to excel in this field. The career is promising and can earn you high rewards. Now I would like to list few important interview questions that are generally asked by an employer for an Interview of an Oracle Developer: 1. Tell us about your qualifications.

The question is very important for you to tell about your capability for the job. If you are certified programmer then it will be easier for you. Give details about your qualifications. Mention your important projects. If you have achieved some applause for your work then do mention. 2. files. 3. Give the components of physical database structure Give a relation between Database, Tablespace and Data File.

A database is divided logically to comprise one or more tablespaces. Each tablespace is consisted of one or more Data

Oracle Database physical structure comprise of: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 4. 1. Data Files: These are .dbf file. These occupy fixed size on the hard disk. A data file contains a data block, 2. Control Files: It contains configuration parameters. It is basically used to depict one slot per data file. The 3. Online Redo Log Files: These files have an extension .rdo and .arc 4. Trace Files: These are .trc files. These save traces of the user session. 5. Password Files: These are the file used for security purpose. 6. sidALTR files : These are the log critical files. Give a command to find the time zone in which a database is operating The command that can give result for this query is: SELECT DBTIMEZONE FROM DUAL; 5. What are redo logs.

row id and Table clusters. extension for the file is .ctl.

Redo logs are physical and logical structures that hold the alterations made in a database. Redo logs are useful at times when recovery of database is done. 6. What do you mean by coalescing a tablespace?

Coalescing is used to utilize defragment space and dictionary managed tablespace for combining neighboring extents into a single extent. These are the few important interview questions that are generally asked by an employer in an interview of an Oracle Developer. All the Best!

Management Interview Questions

You can expect to see the following management interview questions on your next interview if you are interviewing for positions in management, project management, or even team leader positions. 1. How would your co-workers describe you? Management Interview questions like this are generally asked to discover additional hidden qualities about yourself that you might not otherwise have mentioned. My co-workers will tell you that I am a team player and a colleague they can count on to pull his weight whether its a normal day or were in a crunch. 2. What is your viewpoint of management? Interview questions for management like this are asked to find out what kind of leader you are. Should you ever get placed in a management role, how will you delegate the workload or teach your co-workers. I believe the main goal of any management position is to get things done by evenly distributing the workload to the most qualified members of the team. They also make sure that each member of the team has all the resources and training that are necessary to complete the job. They are loyal and are always working in the best interest of the company. Their job is tough; they must evaluate employee performance, empower members of the team and be able to identify those who are not pulling their own weight. 3. What is your definition of success? The interviewer is looking for work related examples of how you measure success and when know you have reached accomplishment. Use a work related example and keep your answer short and to the point. In my opinion and as it relates to the workplace, success is a measurable variable. If you dont measure your accomplishments, success is lost. Success can be tied to everything you do each day. If I plan to accomplish 3 tasks before the end of the day and I do so, then I have been successful. Success simply means accomplishing what you set out to do within the parameters you specify, whether they be time, money or learning, etc. 4. What is your definition of failure? This question is really just the opposite of your definition of success. What does failure mean to you and how do you know you have failed within a given timeframe. Keep in mind that failure is just a perspective.

For starters, failure is an event and not a person and you only fail if you quit and Im not a quitter. I may not complete a project on time or miss an important deadline, but that does not qualify as having failed in my book. If I complete a task, but miss a deadline, I still consider it a success because I finished, but without the desired result. 5. Do you know who our competitors are? Do your homework and research the company and find out who are their competitors. Management interview questions like this will quickly reveal how well you conducted your research prior to the interview. If you did your homework, then youre telling the interviewer that you are serious about this job and its that little extra effort that you show in the interview that will clearly separate you from your competition. Now, if you are interviewing at General Electric, obviously they have thousands of competitors as they make thousands of products. So do your homework. Yes, I work for one of them but I have always admired your company and have always wanted to work here. 6. Do you feel that you are an organized person? They are not asking if you keep a messy desk. Dont reveal any organizational flaws you may have as that will be a strike against you and if you do have your act together, dont come across as being a neatness freak either. Instead, speak of your ability to manage time and workload. Yes, I consider myself to be very well organized. Everyday when I arrive at work, I check my email and messages. Then I plan out exactly what I am going to do that day. Even if I already know that I am going to work on the Johnson proposal, I still review my current status and set my goals for the day. At the end of the day, I review my progress and plan for the following day. 7. How do you manage your time? Obviously, your answer should reflect that you are a self starter and never put things off. They want to hear that you set goals for your work and how you prioritize them. I only have so many hours in the day to get my work done and I have found that if I dont create daily, weekly, and monthly goals, it seems like nothing ever gets done. I keep track of all my responsibilities and goals in spreadsheet and review them daily. I mark down when I am first assigned a task, how long I think it will take, when it needs to be completed and how much time I will need to spend on it each day to complete the job on time. This helps me in so many ways, but mainly it keeps me on track with what is important. It also helps me from getting overbooked and promising more than I can deliver. Now, I can always deliver what I promise and be on-time. 8. We are a fast moving company and things are always changing, how do you think you will fit in with our ever changing and fast paced environment? This question is best answered with an example from one of your past jobs that casts you in the spotlight showing and demonstrating your capabilities of handling change. Our company has 20 field sales reps and they need to receive their email on the cell phone. This is something the IT department knows little about and has never supported mobile devices for a variety of reasons. The request came down from the president and we needed to make this happen immediately. I was out of my element on this one and knew little about the subject, but I was assigned the entire task with a short deadline. So I researched the various technologies that would support our needs, tested several of them and after 3 weeks of hard work I presented my findings to the sales department and allowed them to make a decision on one of the three options. Once they accepted, I soon got to work and within two weeks every sales person could now retrieve their mail from their cell phone any where in the world. It

was a huge undertaking and we soon learned that sales went up 11% and that growth has been directly attributed to the success of this project because sales could now provide a faster response to our customers. 9. What information do you need before making a decision? You want to tailor your answer to match the job or their corporate culture. For example, if youre interviewing to be an airline pilot, dont tell the interviewer that you like to sleep on things before making a decision. Or, if youre interviewing for a medical position, you dont want to come across as one who makes decisions on a hunch. Before I make any kind of important decision, I first consider all the surrounding facts, possible outcomes and the desired goal. I wont hesitate to seek an outside opinion and I generally do, but I am the one who makes the ultimate decision. Once I have all of the information and have weighed the risks of each possible outcome, I will make my decision. 10. How do you react to problems? This question is basically asking if you panic when problems arise. So make it clear in your answer that you make all attempts to anticipate problems before they arise so you can deal with them in a more controlled environment. I dont react to problems, but acknowledge their existence and respond to them in a calm manner. Reacting to a problem causes a panic and the problem does not get resolved until everyone calms down, accepts the situation and then focuses on a resolution. 11. Do you consider yourself a risk taker or do you like to play it safe? Most of us are a little of each, but be careful how you tailor your answer. If you come across as a risk taker, you may be prejudged as one who will disregard corporate policy in the future. It is best to come across as one who generally plays it safe, but is not afraid of taking risks as long as everything has been done to mitigate the risk. I believe that taking risks is part of life but by mitigating the risk, I believe the best possible solution presents itself. Im not afraid of taking risks; I just make sure that I have considered all the facts and possible outcomes my decision will have. Inside The Complete Interview Answer Guide, youll find many more interview

Oracle Database Administration (DBA) Interview Questions (Technical)

Here are some of the Common Interview Questions for Oracle Database Administrator. As of now it contains 120 Questions. These questions are common for both Senior Oracle DBA or Junior DBA. I have divided the questions into 3 categories Technical Interview Questions, Unix Related questions asked to an Oracle Database Administrator (DBA) and Backup and Recovery Interview Questions commonly asked in Oracle DBA interview
1. What is an Oracle Instance? 2. What information is stored in Control File? 3. When you start an Oracle DB which file is accessed first? 4. What is the Job of SMON, PMON processes? 5. What is Instance Recovery? 6. What is written in Redo Log Files? 7. How do you control number of Datafiles one can have in an Oracle database? 8. How many Maximum Datafiles can there be in an Oracle Database? 9. What is a Tablespace? 10. What is the purpose of Redo Log files? 11. Which default Database roles are created when you create a Database? 12. What is a Checkpoint? 13. Which Process reads data from Datafiles?

14. Which Process writes data in Datafiles? 15. Can you make a Datafile auto extendible. If yes, how? 16. What is a Shared Pool? 17. What is kept in the Database Buffer Cache? 18. How many maximum Redo Logfiles one can have in a Database? 19. What is difference between PFile and SPFile? 20. What is PGA_AGGREGRATE_TARGET parameter?

1. Which types of backups you can take in Oracle? 2. A database is running in NOARCHIVELOG mode then which type of backups you can take? 2. 3. Can you take partial backups if the Database is running in NOARCHIVELOG mode? 4. Can you take Online Backups if the the database is running in NOARCHIVELOG mode? 5. How do you bring the database in ARCHIVELOG mode from NOARCHIVELOG mode? 6. You cannot shutdown the database for even some minutes, then in which mode you should run the database? 7. Where should you place Archive logfiles, in the same disk where DB is or another disk? 8. Can you take online backup of a Control file if yes, how? 9. What is a Logical Backup? 10. Should you take the backup of Logfiles if the database is running in ARCHIVELOG mode? 11. Why do you take tablespaces in Backup mode?

12. What is the advantage of RMAN utility? 13. How RMAN improves backup time? 14. Can you take Offline backups using RMAN? 15. How do you see information about backups in RMAN? 16. What is a Recovery Catalog? 17. Should you place Recovery Catalog in the Same DB? 18. Can you use RMAN without Recovery catalog? 19. Can you take Image Backups using RMAN? 20. Can you use Backupsets created by RMAN with any other utility?

Backup and Recovery Interview Questions for an Oracle DBA Page 2

Some of the Common Backup and Recovery Interview Questions for Oracle Database Administrator. These questions are common for both Senior Oracle DBA or Junior DBA. I have compiled these questions based upon the feedback I got from many candidates who have attended interviews in various MNC's
21. Where RMAN keeps information of backups if you are using RMAN without Catalog? 22. You have taken a manual backup of a datafile using o/s. How RMAN will know about it? 23. You want to retain only last 3 backups of datafiles. How do you go for it in RMAN? 24. Which is more efficient Incremental Backups using RMAN or Incremental Export?

25. Can you start and shutdown DB using RMAN? 26. How do you recover from the loss of datafile if the DB is running in NOARCHIVELOG mode? 27. You loss one datafile and it does not contain important objects. The important objects are there in other datafiles which are intact. How do you proceed in this situation? 28. You lost some datafiles and you don't have any full backup and the database was running in NOARCHIVELOG mode. What you can do now? 29. How do you recover from the loss of datafile if the DB is running in ARCHIVELOG mode? 30. You loss one datafile and DB is running in ARCHIVELOG mode. You have full database backup of 1 week old and partial backup of this datafile which is just 1 day old. From which backup should you restore this file? 31. You loss controlfile how do you recover from this? 32. The current logfile gets damaged. What you can do now? 33. What is a Complete Recovery? 34. What is Cancel Based, Time based and Change Based Recovery? 35. Some user has accidentally dropped one table and you realize this after two days. Can you recover this table if the DB is running in ARCHIVELOG mode? 36. Do you have to restore Datafiles manually from backups if you are doing recovery using RMAN? 37. A database is running in ARCHIVELOG mode since last one month. A datafile is added to the database last week. Many objects are created in this datafile. After one week this datafile gets damaged before you can take any backup. Now can you recover this datafile when you don't have any backups? 38. How do you recover from the loss of a controlfile if you have backup of controlfile? 39. Only some blocks are damaged in a datafile. Can you just recover these blocks if you are using RMAN? 40. Some datafiles were there on a secondary disk and that disk has become damaged and it will take some days to get a new disk. How will you recover from this situation? 41. Have you faced any emergency situation. Tell us how you resolved it? 42. At one time you lost parameter file accidentally and you don't have any backup. How you will recreate a new parameter file with the parameters set to previous values.

In response for a reader of this blog who asked me for some interview questions for a 3+Year experienced DBA, I have written this series of questions that you can use in your interviews. Either if you are the interviewer, or the interviewer. Enjoy! 1. Basic (Every DBA should answer correctly ALL these questions. This knowledge is just basic for a 3+ year experienced DBA) 1.1 Q- Which are the default passwords of SYSTEM/SYS? A- MANAGER / CHANGE_ON_INSTALL 1.2 Q- How can you execute a script file in SQLPLUS? A- To execute a script file in SQLPlus, type @ and then the file name. 1.3 Q- Where can you find official Oracle documentation? A- tahiti.oracle.com 1.4 Q- What is the address of the Official Oracle Support? A- metalink.oracle.com or support.oracle.com 1.5 Q- What file will you use to establish Oracle connections from a remote client? A- tnsnames.ora 1.6 Q- How can you check if the database is accepting connections? A- lsnrctl status or lsnrctl services 1.7 Q- Which log would you check if a database has a problem? A- Alert log 1.8 Q- Name three clients to connect with Oracle, for example, SQL Developer: A- SQL Developer, SQL-Plus, TOAD, dbvisualizer, PL/SQL Developer There are several, but an experienced dba should know at least three clients. 1.9 Q- How can you check the structure of a table from sqlplus? A- DESCRIBE or DESC 1.10 Q- What command will you start to run the installation of Oracle software on Linux? A- runInstaller 2. Moderate (Standard knoledge for a daily-work of every DBA. He could fail one or two questions, but not more) 2.1 Q- What should you do if you encounter an ORA-600? A- Contact Oracle Support 2.2 Q- Explain the differences between PFILE and SPFILE A- A PFILE is a Static, text file that initialices the database parameter in the moment that its started. If you want to modify parameters in PFILE, you have to restart the database. A PFILE is a dynamic, binary file that allows you to overwrite parameters while the database is already started (with some exceptions) 2.3 Q- In which Oracle version was Data Pump introduced? A- Oracle 10g

2.4 Q- Say two examples of DML, two of DCL and two of DDL A- DML: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, CALL, EXPLAIN PLAN, LOCK TABLE DDL: CREATE, ALTER, DROP, TRUNCATE, COMMENT, RENAME DCL: GRANT, REVOKE 2.5 Q- You want to save the output of an Oracle script from sqlplus. How would you do it? A- spool script_name.txt select * from your_oracle_operations; spool off; 2.6 Q- What is the most important requirement in order to use RMAN to make consistent hot backups? A- Your database has to be in ARCHIVELOG mode. 2.7 Q- Can you connect to a local database without a listener? A- Yes, you can. 2.8 Q- In which view can you find information about every view and table of oracle dictionary? A- DICT or DICTIONARY 2.9 Q- How can you view all the users account in the database? A- SELECT USERNAME FROM DBA_USERS; 2.10 Q- In linux, how can we change which databases are started during a reboot? A- Edit /etc/oratab 3. Advanced (A 3+ year experienced DBA should have enough knowledge to answer these questions. However, depending on the work he has done, he could still fail up to 4 questions) 3.1 Q- When a user process fails, what Oracle background process will clean after it? A- PMON 3.2 Q- How can you reduce the space of TEMP datafile? A- Prior to Oracle 11g, you had to recreate the datafile. In Oracle 11g a new feature was introduced, and you can shrink the TEMP tablespace. 3.3 Q- How can you view all the current users connected in your database in this moment? A- SELECT COUNT(*),USERNAME FROM V$SESSION GROUP BY USERNAME; 3.4 Q- Explain the differences between SHUTDOWN, SHUTDOWN NORMAL, SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE AND SHUTDOWN ABORT A- SHUTOWN NORMAL = SHUTDOWN : It waits for all sessions to end, without allowing new connections. SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE : Rollback current transactions and terminates every session. SHUTDOWN ABORT : Aborts all the sessions, leaving the database in an inconsistent state. Its the fastest method, but can lead to database corruption. 3.5 Q- Is it possible to backup your database without the use of an RMAN database to store the catalog? A- Yes, but the catalog would be stored in the controlfile. 3.6 Q- Which are the main components of Oracle Grid Control? A- OMR (Oracle Management Repository), OMS (Oracle Management Server) and OMA (Oracle Management Agent). 3.7 Q- What command will you use to navigate through ASM files? A- asmcmd 3.8 Q- What is the difference between a view and a materialized view? A- A view is a select that is executed each time an user accesses to it. A materialized view stores the result of this query in memory for faster access purposes. 3.9 Q- Which one is faster: DELETE or TRUNCATE? A- TRUNCATE

3.10 Q- Are passwords in oracle case sensitive? A- Only since Oracle 11g. 4. RAC (Only intended for RAC-specific DBAs, with varied difficultied questions) 4.1 Q- What is the recommended method to make backups of a RAC environment? A- RMAN to make backups of the database, dd to backup your voting disk and hard copies of the OCR file. 4.2 Q- What command would you use to check the availability of the RAC system? A- crs_stat -t -v (-t -v are optional) 4.3 Q- What is the minimum number of instances you need to have in order to create a RAC? A- 1. You can create a RAC with just one server. 4.4 Q- Name two specific RAC background processes A- RAC processes are: LMON, LMDx, LMSn, LKCx and DIAG. 4.5 Q- Can you have many database versions in the same RAC? A- Yes, but Clusterware version must be greater than the greater database version. 4.6 Q- What was RAC previous name before it was called RAC? A- OPS: Oracle Parallel Server 4.7 Q- What RAC component is used for communication between instances? A- Private Interconnect. 4.8 Q- What is the difference between normal views and RAC views? A- RAC views has the prefix G. For example, GV$SESSION instead of V$SESSION 4.9 Q- Which command will we use to manage (stop, start) RAC services in command-line mode? A- srvctl 4.10 Q- How many alert logs exist in a RAC environment? A- One for each instance. 5. Master (A 3+ year experienced DBA would probably fail these questions, they are very specifid and specially difficult. Be glad if hes able to answer some of them) 5.1 Q- How can you difference a usual parameter and an undocumented parameter? A- Undocumented parameters have the prefix _. For example, _allow_resetlogs_corruption 5.2 Q- What is BBED? A- An undocumented Oracle tool used for foresnic purposes. Stans for Block Browser and EDitor. 5.3 Q- The result of the logical comparison (NULL = NULL) will be And in the case of (NULL != NULL) A- False in both cases. 5.4 Q- Explain Oracle memory structure The Oracle RDBMS creates and uses storage on the computer hard disk and in random access memory (RAM). The portion in the computer s RAM is called memory structure. Oracle has two memory structures in the computer s RAM. The two structures are the Program Global Area (PGA) and the System Global Area (SGA). The PGA contains data and control information for a single user process. The SGA is the memory segment that stores data that the user has retrieved from the database or data that the user wants to place into the database. 5.5 Q- Will RMAN take backups of read-only tablespaces? A- No 5.6 Q- Will a user be able to modify a table with SELECT only privilege? A- He wont be able to UPDATE/INSERT into that table, but for some reason, he will still be able to lock a certain table. 5.7 Q- What Oracle tool will you use to transform datafiles into text files?

A- Trick question: you cant do that, at least with any Oracle tool. A very experienced DBA should perfectly know this. 5.8 Q- SQL> SELECT * FROM MY_SCHEMA.MY_TABLE; SP2-0678: Column or attribute type can not be displayed by SQL*Plus Why Im getting this error? A- The table has a BLOB column. 5.9 Q- What parameter will you use to force the starting of your database with a corrupted resetlog? A- _ALLOW_RESETLOGS_CORRUPTION 5.10 Q- Name the seven types of Oracle tables A- Heap Organized Tables, Index Organized Tables, Index Clustered Tables, Hash Clustered Tables, Nested Tables, Global Temporary Tables, Object Tables.

General Questions
Tell

us about yourself/ your background. What are the three major characteristics that you bring to the job market? What motivates you to do a good job? What two or three things are most important to you at work? What qualities do you think are essential to be successful in this kind of work? What courses did you attend? What job certifications do you hold? What subjects/courses did you excel in? Why? What subjects/courses gave you trouble? Why? How does your previous work experience prepare you for this position? How do you define 'success'? What has been your most significant accomplishment to date? Describe a challenge you encountered and how you dealt with it. Describe a failure and how you dealt with it. Describe the 'ideal' job... the 'ideal' supervisor. What leadership roles have you held? What prejudices do you hold? What do you like to do in your spare time? What are your career goals (a) 3 years from now; (b) 10 years from now? How does this position match your career goals? What have you done in the past year to improve yourself? In what areas do you feel you need further education and training to be successful? What do you know about our company? Why do you want to work for this company. Why should we hire you? Where do you see yourself fitting in to this organization ...initially? ...in 5 years? Why are you looking for a new job? How do you feel about re-locating? Are you willing to travel? What are your salary requirements?

 When

would you be available to start if you were selected?

Here are few interview questions with answers found on the internet. As I don't have time to format these questions to wiki I am just pasting them hoping someone to format them. -Krishna [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. Explain the difference between a hot backup and a cold backup and the benefits associated with each. A hot backup is basically taking a backup of the database while it is still up and running and it must be in archive log mode. A cold backup is taking a backup of the database while it is shut down and does not require being in archive log mode. The benefit of taking a hot backup is that the database is still available for use while the backup is occurring and you can recover the database to any ball in time. The benefit of taking a cold backup is that it is typically easier to administer the backup and recovery process. In addition, since you are taking cold backups the database does not require being in archive log mode and thus there will be a slight performance gain as the database is not cutting archive logs to disk. 2. You have just had to restore from backup and do not have any control files. How would you go about bringing up this database? I would create a text based backup control file, stipulating where on disk all the data files where and then issue the recover command with the using backup control file clause. 3. How do you switch from an init.ora file to a spfile? Issue the create spfile from pfile command. 4. Explain the difference between a data block, an extent and a segment. A data block is the smallest unit of logical storage for a database object. As objects grow they take chunks of additional storage that are composed of contiguous data blocks. These groupings of contiguous data blocks are called extents. All the extents that an object takes when grouped together are considered the segment of the database object. 5. Give two examples of how you might determine the structure of the table DEPT. Use the describe command or use the dbms_metadata.get_ddl package. 6. Where would you look for errors from the database engine? In the alert log. 7. Compare and contrast TRUNCATE and DELETE for a table. Both the truncate and delete command have the desired outcome of getting rid of all the rows in a table. The difference between the two is that the truncate command is a DDL operation and just moves the high water mark and produces a now rollback. The delete command, on the other hand, is a DML operation, which will produce a rollback and thus take longer to complete. 8. Give the reasoning behind using an index.

Faster access to data blocks in a table. 9. Give the two types of tables involved in producing a star schema and the type of data they hold. Fact tables and dimension tables. A fact table contains measurements while dimension tables will contain data that will help describe the fact tables. 10. What type of index should you use on a fact table? A Bitmap index. 11. Give some examples of the types of database contraints you may find in Oracle and indicate their purpose. A Primary or Unique Key can be used to enforce uniqueness on one or more columns. A Referential Integrity Contraint can be used to enforce a Foreign Key relationship between two tables. A Not Null constraint - to ensure a value is entered in a column A Value Constraint - to check a column value against a specific set of values. 12. A table is classified as a parent table and you want to drop and re-create it. How would you do this without affecting the children tables? Disable the foreign key constraint to the parent, drop the table, re-create the table, enable the foreign key constraint. 13. Explain the difference between ARCHIVELOG mode and NOARCHIVELOG mode and the benefits and disadvantages to each. ARCHIVELOG mode is a mode that you can put the database in for creating a backup of all transactions that have occurred in the database so that you can recover to any ball in time. NOARCHIVELOG mode is basically the absence of ARCHIVELOG mode and has the disadvantage of not being able to recover to any ball in time. NOARCHIVELOG mode does have the advantage of not having to write transactions to an archive log and thus increases the performance of the database slightly. 14. What command would you use to create a backup control file? Alter database backup control file to trace. 15. Give the stages of instance startup to a usable state where normal users may access it. STARTUP NOMOUNT - Instance startup STARTUP MOUNT - The database is mounted STARTUP OPEN - The database is opened 16. What column differentiates the V$ views to the GV$ views and how? The INST_ID column which indicates the instance in a RAC environment the information came from. 17. How would you go about generating an EXPLAIN plan? Create a plan table with utlxplan.sql. Use the explain plan set statement_id = 'tst1' into plan_table for a SQL statement

Look at the explain plan with utlxplp.sql or utlxpls.sql 18. How would you go about increasing the buffer cache hit ratio? Use the buffer cache advisory over a given workload and then query the v$db_cache_advice table. If a change was necessary then I would use the alter system set db_cache_size command. 19. Explain an ORA-01555. You get this error when you get a snapshot too old within rollback. It can usually be solved by increasing the undo retention or increasing the size of rollbacks. You should also look at the logic involved in the application getting the error message. 20. Explain the difference between $ORACLE_HOME and $ORACLE_BASE. ORACLE_BASE is the root directory for oracle. ORACLE_HOME located beneath ORACLE_BASE is where the oracle products reside. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. How would you determine the time zone under which a database was operating? using SELECT dbtimezone FROM DUAL; 2. Explain the use of setting GLOBAL_NAMES equal to TRUE. It ensure the use of consistent naming conventions for databases and links in a networked environment. 3. What command would you use to encrypt a PL/SQL application? 4. Explain the difference between a FUNCTION, PROCEDURE and PACKAGE. 5. Explain the use of table functions. 6. Name three advisory statistics you can collect. 7. Where in the Oracle directory tree structure are audit traces placed? 8. Explain materialized views and how they are used. 9. When a user process fails, what background process cleans up after it?
It is PMON.

10. What background process refreshes materialized views? 11. How would you determine what sessions are connected and what resources they are waiting for? 12. Describe what redo logs are. 13. How would you force a log switch?
alter system switch logfile;

14. Give two methods you could use to determine what DDL changes have been made. 15. What does coalescing a tablespace do? 16. What is the difference between a TEMPORARY tablespace and a PERMANENT tablespace? 17. Name a tablespace automatically created when you create a database.

When database is created then system tablespace is created automatically.....

18. When creating a user, what permissions must you grant to allow them to connect to the database?
Grant create session to username;

19. How do you add a data file to a tablespace?

Syntax will be like this: alter tablespace USERS add datafile '/ora01/oradata/users02.dbf' size 50M;

20. How do you resize a data file?

Alter database datafile '/ora01/oradata/users02.dbf' resize 100M;

21. What view would you use to look at the size of a data file?
dba_data_files

22. What view would you use to determine free space in a tablespace?
DBA_TS_QUOTAS

23. How would you determine who has added a row to a table?
By using trigger on INSERT option

24. How can you rebuild an index?

ALTER INDEX index_name REBUILD;

25. Explain what partitioning is and what its benefit is.

A table partition is also a table segment, and by using partitioning technique we can enhance performance of table access.

26. You have just compiled a PL/SQL package but got errors, how would you view the errors?
By using ERRNAME and ERRCODE;

27. How can you gather statistics on a table? 28. How can you enable a trace for a session?
alter session set sql_trace='TRUE';

29. What is the difference between the SQL*Loader and IMPORT utilities?

SQL*LOADER loads external data which is in OS files to oracle database tables while IMPORT utility imports data only which is exported by EXPORT utility of oracle database.

30. Name two files used for network connection to a database.

TNSNAMES.ORA and SQLNET.ORA

[edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. Describe the difference between a procedure, function and anonymous pl/sql block. Candidate should mention use of DECLARE statement, a function must return a value while a procedure doesn?t have to. 2. What is a mutating table error and how can you get around it? This happens with triggers. It occurs because the trigger is trying to update a row it is currently using. The usual fix involves either use of views or temporary tables so the database is selecting from one while updating the other. 3. Describe the use of %ROWTYPE and %TYPE in PL/SQL Expected answer: %ROWTYPE allows you to associate a variable with an entire table row. The %TYPE associates a variable with a single column type. 4. What packages (if any) has Oracle provided for use by developers? Expected answer: Oracle provides the DBMS_ series of packages. There are many which developers should be aware of such as DBMS_SQL, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_TRANSACTION, DBMS_LOCK, DBMS_ALERT, DBMS_OUTPUT, DBMS_JOB, DBMS_UTILITY, DBMS_DDL, UTL_FILE. If they can mention a few of these and describe how they used them, even better. If they include the SQL routines provided by Oracle, great, but not really what was asked. 5. Describe the use of PL/SQL tables Expected answer: PL/SQL tables are scalar arrays that can be referenced by a binary integer. They can be used to hold values for use in later queries or calculations. In Oracle 8 they will be able to be of the %ROWTYPE designation, or RECORD. 6. When is a declare statement needed ? The DECLARE statement is used in PL/SQL anonymous blocks such as with stand alone, non-stored PL/SQL procedures. It must come first in a PL/SQL stand alone file if it is used. 7. In what order should a open/fetch/loop set of commands in a PL/SQL block be implemented if you use the %NOTFOUND cursor variable in the exit when statement? Why? Expected answer: OPEN then FETCH then LOOP followed by the exit when. If not specified in this order will result in the final return being done twice because of the way the %NOTFOUND is handled by PL/SQL.

8. What are SQLCODE and SQLERRM and why are they important for PL/SQL developers? Expected answer: SQLCODE returns the value of the error number for the last error encountered. The SQLERRM returns the actual error message for the last error encountered. They can be used in exception handling to report, or, store in an error log table, the error that occurred in the code. These are especially useful for the WHEN OTHERS exception. 9. How can you find within a PL/SQL block, if a cursor is open? Expected answer: Use the %ISOPEN cursor status variable. 10. How can you generate debugging output from PL/SQL? Expected answer: Use the DBMS_OUTPUT package. Another possible method is to just use the SHOW ERROR command, but this only shows errors. The DBMS_OUTPUT package can be used to show intermediate results from loops and the status of variables as the procedure is executed. The new package UTL_FILE can also be used. 11. What are the types of triggers? Expected Answer: There are 12 types of triggers in PL/SQL that consist of combinations of the BEFORE, AFTER, ROW, TABLE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and ALL key words: BEFORE ALL ROW INSERT AFTER ALL ROW INSERT BEFORE INSERT AFTER INSERT etc. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. A tablespace has a table with 30 extents in it. Is this bad? Why or why not. Multiple extents in and of themselves aren?t bad. However if you also have chained rows this can hurt performance. 2. How do you set up tablespaces during an Oracle installation? You should always attempt to use the Oracle Flexible Architecture standard or another partitioning scheme to ensure proper separation of SYSTEM, ROLLBACK, REDO LOG, DATA, TEMPORARY and INDEX segments. 3. You see multiple fragments in the SYSTEM tablespace, what should you check first? Ensure that users don?t have the SYSTEM tablespace as their TEMPORARY or DEFAULT tablespace assignment by checking the DBA_USERS view. 4. What are some indications that you need to increase the SHARED_POOL_SIZE parameter? Poor data dictionary or library cache hit ratios, getting error ORA-04031. Another indication is steadily decreasing performance with all other tuning parameters the same. 5. What is the general guideline for sizing db_block_size and db_multi_block_read for an application that does many full table scans? Oracle almost always reads in 64k chunks. The two should have a product equal to 64 or a multiple of 64.

6. What is the fastest query method for a table Fetch by rowid 7. Explain the use of TKPROF? What initialization parameter should be turned on to get full TKPROF output? The tkprof tool is a tuning tool used to determine cpu and execution times for SQL statements. You use it by first setting timed_statistics to true in the initialization file and then turning on tracing for either the entire database via the sql_trace parameter or for the session using the ALTER SESSION command. Once the trace file is generated you run the tkprof tool against the trace file and then look at the output from the tkprof tool. This can also be used to generate explain plan output. 8. When looking at v$sysstat you see that sorts (disk) is high. Is this bad or good? If bad -How do you correct it? If you get excessive disk sorts this is bad. This indicates you need to tune the sort area parameters in the initialization files. The major sort are parameter is the SORT_AREA_SIZe parameter. 9. When should you increase copy latches? What parameters control copy latches When you get excessive contention for the copy latches as shown by the "redo copy" latch hit ratio. You can increase copy latches via the initialization parameter LOG_SIMULTANEOUS_COPIES to twice the number of CPUs on your system. 10. Where can you get a list of all initialization parameters for your instance? How about an indication if they are default settings or have been changed You can look in the init.ora file for an indication of manually set parameters. For all parameters, their value and whether or not the current value is the default value, look in the v$parameter view. 11. Describe hit ratio as it pertains to the database buffers. What is the difference between instantaneous and cumulative hit ratio and which should be used for tuning The hit ratio is a measure of how many times the database was able to read a value from the buffers verses how many times it had to re-read a data value from the disks. A value greater than 80-90% is good, less could indicate problems. If you simply take the ratio of existing parameters this will be a cumulative value since the database started. If you do a comparison between pairs of readings based on some arbitrary time span, this is the instantaneous ratio for that time span. Generally speaking an instantaneous reading gives more valuable data since it will tell you what your instance is doing for the time it was generated over. 12. Discuss row chaining, how does it happen? How can you reduce it? How do you correct it Row chaining occurs when a VARCHAR2 value is updated and the length of the new value is longer than the old value and won?t fit in the remaining block space. This results in the

row chaining to another block. It can be reduced by setting the storage parameters on the table to appropriate values. It can be corrected by export and import of the effected table. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. Give one method for transferring a table from one schema to another: There are several possible methods, export-import, CREATE TABLE... AS SELECT, or COPY. 2. What is the purpose of the IMPORT option IGNORE? What is it?s default setting The IMPORT IGNORE option tells import to ignore "already exists" errors. If it is not specified the tables that already exist will be skipped. If it is specified, the error is ignored and the tables data will be inserted. The default value is N. 3. You have a rollback segment in a version 7.2 database that has expanded beyond optimal, how can it be restored to optimal Use the ALTER TABLESPACE ..... SHRINK command. 4. If the DEFAULT and TEMPORARY tablespace clauses are left out of a CREATE USER command what happens? Is this bad or good? Why The user is assigned the SYSTEM tablespace as a default and temporary tablespace. This is bad because it causes user objects and temporary segments to be placed into the SYSTEM tablespace resulting in fragmentation and improper table placement (only data dictionary objects and the system rollback segment should be in SYSTEM). 5. What are some of the Oracle provided packages that DBAs should be aware of Oracle provides a number of packages in the form of the DBMS_ packages owned by the SYS user. The packages used by DBAs may include: DBMS_SHARED_POOL, DBMS_UTILITY, DBMS_SQL, DBMS_DDL, DBMS_SESSION, DBMS_OUTPUT and DBMS_SNAPSHOT. They may also try to answer with the UTL*.SQL or CAT*.SQL series of SQL procedures. These can be viewed as extra credit but aren?t part of the answer. 6. What happens if the constraint name is left out of a constraint clause The Oracle system will use the default name of SYS_Cxxxx where xxxx is a system generated number. This is bad since it makes tracking which table the constraint belongs to or what the constraint does harder. 7. What happens if a tablespace clause is left off of a primary key constraint clause This results in the index that is automatically generated being placed in then users default tablespace. Since this will usually be the same tablespace as the table is being created in, this can cause serious performance problems. 8. What is the proper method for disabling and re-enabling a primary key constraint You use the ALTER TABLE command for both. However, for the enable clause you must specify the USING INDEX and TABLESPACE clause for primary keys.

9. What happens if a primary key constraint is disabled and then enabled without fully specifying the index clause The index is created in the user?s default tablespace and all sizing information is lost. Oracle doesn?t store this information as a part of the constraint definition, but only as part of the index definition, when the constraint was disabled the index was dropped and the information is gone. 10. (On UNIX) When should more than one DB writer process be used? How many should be used If the UNIX system being used is capable of asynchronous IO then only one is required, if the system is not capable of asynchronous IO then up to twice the number of disks used by Oracle number of DB writers should be specified by use of the db_writers initialization parameter. 11. You are using hot backup without being in archivelog mode, can you recover in the event of a failure? Why or why not You can?t use hot backup without being in archivelog mode. So no, you couldn?t recover. 12. What causes the "snapshot too old" error? How can this be prevented or mitigated This is caused by large or long running transactions that have either wrapped onto their own rollback space or have had another transaction write on part of their rollback space. This can be prevented or mitigated by breaking the transaction into a set of smaller transactions or increasing the size of the rollback segments and their extents. 13. How can you tell if a database object is invalid By checking the status column of the DBA_, ALL_ or USER_OBJECTS views, depending upon whether you own or only have permission on the view or are using a DBA account. 13. A user is getting an ORA-00942 error yet you know you have granted them permission on the table, what else should you check You need to check that the user has specified the full name of the object (select empid from scott.emp; instead of select empid from emp;) or has a synonym that balls to the object (create synonym emp for scott.emp;) 14. A developer is trying to create a view and the database won?t let him. He has the "DEVELOPER" role which has the "CREATE VIEW" system privilege and SELECT grants on the tables he is using, what is the problem You need to verify the developer has direct grants on all tables used in the view. You can?t create a stored object with grants given through views. 15. If you have an example table, what is the best way to get sizing data for the production table implementation The best way is to analyze the table and then use the data provided in the DBA_TABLES view to get the average row length and other pertinent data for the calculation. The quick

and dirty way is to look at the number of blocks the table is actually using and ratio the number of rows in the table to its number of blocks against the number of expected rows. 16. How can you find out how many users are currently logged into the database? How can you find their operating system id There are several ways. One is to look at the v$session or v$process views. Another way is to check the current_logins parameter in the v$sysstat view. Another if you are on UNIX is to do a "ps -ef|grep oracle|wc -l? command, but this only works against a single instance installation. 17. A user selects from a sequence and gets back two values, his select is: SELECT pk_seq.nextval FROM dual;What is the problem Somehow two values have been inserted into the dual table. This table is a single row, single column table that should only have one value in it. 18. How can you determine if an index needs to be dropped and rebuilt Run the ANALYZE INDEX command on the index to validate its structure and then calculate the ratio of LF_BLK_LEN/LF_BLK_LEN+BR_BLK_LEN and if it isn?t near 1.0 (i.e. greater than 0.7 or so) then the index should be rebuilt. Or if the ratio BR_BLK_LEN/ LF_BLK_LEN+BR_BLK_LEN is nearing 0.3. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. How can variables be passed to a SQL routine By use of the & symbol. For passing in variables the numbers 1-8 can be used (&1, &2,...,&8) to pass the values after the command into the SQLPLUS session. To be prompted for a specific variable, place the ampersanded variable in the code itself: "select * from dba_tables where owner=&owner_name;" . Use of double ampersands tells SQLPLUS to resubstitute the value for each subsequent use of the variable, a single ampersand will cause a reprompt for the value unless an ACCEPT statement is used to get the value from the user. 2. You want to include a carriage return/linefeed in your output from a SQL script, how can you do this The best method is to use the CHR() function (CHR(10) is a return/linefeed) and the concatenation function "||". Another method, although it is hard to document and isn?t always portable is to use the return/linefeed as a part of a quoted string. 3. How can you call a PL/SQL procedure from SQL By use of the EXECUTE (short form EXEC) command. 4. How do you execute a host operating system command from within SQL By use of the exclamation ball "!" (in UNIX and some other OS) or the HOST (HO) command.

5. You want to use SQL to build SQL, what is this called and give an example This is called dynamic SQL. An example would be: set lines 90 pages 0 termout off feedback off verify off spool drop_all.sql select ?drop user ?||username||? cascade;? from dba_users where username not in ("SYS?,?SYSTEM?); spool off Essentially you are looking to see that they know to include a command (in this case DROP USER...CASCADE;) and that you need to concatenate using the ?||? the values selected from the database. 6. What SQLPlus command is used to format output from a select This is best done with the COLUMN command. 7. You want to group the following set of select returns, what can you group on Max(sum_of_cost), min(sum_of_cost), count(item_no), item_no The only column that can be grouped on is the "item_no" column, the rest have aggregate functions associated with them. 8. What special Oracle feature allows you to specify how the cost based system treats a SQL statement The COST based system allows the use of HINTs to control the optimizer path selection. If they can give some example hints such as FIRST ROWS, ALL ROWS, USING INDEX, STAR, even better. 9. You want to determine the location of identical rows in a table before attempting to place a unique index on the table, how can this be done Oracle tables always have one guaranteed unique column, the rowid column. If you use a min/max function against your rowid and then select against the proposed primary key you can squeeze out the rowids of the duplicate rows pretty quick. For example: select rowid from emp e where e.rowid > (select min(x.rowid) from emp x where x.emp_no = e.emp_no); In the situation where multiple columns make up the proposed key, they must all be used in the where clause. 10. What is a Cartesian product A Cartesian product is the result of an unrestricted join of two or more tables. The result set of a three table Cartesian product will have x * y * z number of rows where x, y, z correspond to the number of rows in each table involved in the join. 11. You are joining a local and a remote table, the network manager complains about the traffic involved, how can you reduce the network traffic Push the processing of the remote data to the remote instance by using a view to pre-select the information for the join. This will result in only the data required for the join being sent across. 11. What is the default ordering of an ORDER BY clause in a SELECT statement Ascending

12. What is tkprof and how is it used The tkprof tool is a tuning tool used to determine cpu and execution times for SQL statements. You use it by first setting timed_statistics to true in the initialization file and then turning on tracing for either the entire database via the sql_trace parameter or for the session using the ALTER SESSION command. Once the trace file is generated you run the tkprof tool against the trace file and then look at the output from the tkprof tool. This can also be used to generate explain plan output. 13. What is explain plan and how is it used The EXPLAIN PLAN command is a tool to tune SQL statements. To use it you must have an explain_table generated in the user you are running the explain plan for. This is created using the utlxplan.sql script. Once the explain plan table exists you run the explain plan command giving as its argument the SQL statement to be explained. The explain_plan table is then queried to see the execution plan of the statement. Explain plans can also be run using tkprof. 14. How do you set the number of lines on a page of output? The width The SET command in SQLPLUS is used to control the number of lines generated per page and the width of those lines, for example SET PAGESIZE 60 LINESIZE 80 will generate reports that are 60 lines long with a line width of 80 characters. The PAGESIZE and LINESIZE options can be shortened to PAGES and LINES. 15. How do you prevent output from coming to the screen The SET option TERMOUT controls output to the screen. Setting TERMOUT OFF turns off screen output. This option can be shortened to TERM. 16. How do you prevent Oracle from giving you informational messages during and after a SQL statement execution The SET options FEEDBACK and VERIFY can be set to OFF. 17. How do you generate file output from SQL By use of the SPOOL comm [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. What is a CO-RELATED SUBQUERY A CO-RELATED SUBQUERY is one that has a correlation name as table or view designator in the FROM clause of the outer query and the same correlation name as a qualifier of a search condition in the WHERE clause of the subquery. eg
SELECT field1 from table1 X WHERE field2>(select avg(field2) from table1 Y where field1=X.field1);

(The subquery in a correlated subquery is revaluated for every row of the table or view named in the outer query.) 2. What are various joins used while writing SUBQUERIES Self join-Its a join foreign key of a table references the same table. Outer Join--Its a join condition used where One can query all the rows of one of the tables in the join condition even though they don't satisfy the join condition. Equi-join--Its a join condition that retrieves rows from one or more tables in which one or more columns in one table are equal to one or more columns in the second table. 3. What are various constraints used in SQL NULL NOT NULL CHECK DEFAULT 4. What are different Oracle database objects TABLES VIEWS INDEXES SYNONYMS SEQUENCES TABLESPACES etc 5. What is difference between Rename and Alias Rename is a permanent name given to a table or column whereas Alias is a temporary name given to a table or column which do not exist once the SQL statement is executed. 6. What is a view A view is stored procedure based on one or more tables, its a virtual table. 7. What are various privileges that a user can grant to another user SELECT CONNECT RESOURCE 8. What is difference between UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY constraints A table can have only one PRIMARY KEY whereas there can be any number of UNIQUE keys. The columns that compose PK are automatically define NOT NULL, whereas a column that compose a UNIQUE is not automatically defined to be mandatory must also specify the column is NOT NULL. 9. Can a primary key contain more than one columns Yes 10. How you will avoid duplicating records in a query By using DISTINCT 11. What is difference between SQL and SQL*PLUS SQL*PLUS is a command line tool where as SQL and PL/SQL language interface and reporting tool. Its a command line tool that allows user to type SQL commands to be executed directly against an Oracle database. SQL is a language used to query the relational database(DML,DCL,DDL). SQL*PLUS commands are used to format query result, Set options, Edit SQL commands and PL/SQL. 12. Which datatype is used for storing graphics and images LONG RAW data type is used for storing BLOB's (binary large objects). 13. How will you delete duplicating rows from a base table DELETE FROM table_name A WHERE rowid>(SELECT min(rowid) from table_name B where B.table_no=A.table_no); CREATE TABLE new_table AS SELECT DISTINCT * FROM old_table; DROP old_table RENAME new_table TO old_table DELETE FROM table_name A WHERE rowid NOT IN (SELECT MAX(ROWID) FROM table_name GROUP BY column_name) 14. What is difference between SUBSTR and INSTR

SUBSTR returns a specified portion of a string eg SUBSTR('BCDEF',4) output BCDE INSTR provides character position in which a pattern is found in a string. eg INSTR('ABC-DC-F','-',2) output 7 (2nd occurence of '-') 15. There is a string '120000 12 0 .125' ,how you will find the position of the decimal place INSTR('120000 12 0 .125',1,'.') output 13 16. There is a '%' sign in one field of a column. What will be the query to find it. '\' Should be used before '%'. 17. When you use WHERE clause and when you use HAVING clause HAVING clause is used when you want to specify a condition for a group function and it is written after GROUP BY clause The WHERE clause is used when you want to specify a condition for columns, single row functions except group functions and it is written before GROUP BY clause if it is used. 18. Which is more faster - IN or EXISTS EXISTS is more faster than IN because EXISTS returns a Boolean value whereas IN returns a value. 19. What is a OUTER JOIN Outer Join--Its a join condition used where you can query all the rows of one of the tables in the join condition even though they dont satisfy the join condition. 20. How you will avoid your query from using indexes SELECT * FROM emp Where emp_no+' '=12345; i.e you have to concatenate the column name with space within codes in the where condition. SELECT /*+ FULL(a) */ ename, emp_no from emp where emp_no=1234; i.e using HINTS [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. What is a pseudo column. Give some examples It is a column that is not an actual column in the table. eg USER, UID, SYSDATE, ROWNUM, ROWID, NULL, AND LEVEL. Suppose customer table is there having different columns like customer no, payments.What will be the query to select top three max payments. For top N queries, see http://www.orafaq.com/forum/mv/msg/160920/472554/102589/#msg_472554 post 2. What is the purpose of a cluster. Oracle does not allow a user to specifically locate tables, since that is a part of the function of the RDBMS. However, for the purpose of increasing performance, oracle allows a developer to create a CLUSTER. A CLUSTER provides a means for storing data from different tables together for faster retrieval than if the table placement were left to the RDBMS. 3. What is a cursor. Oracle uses work area to execute SQL statements and store processing information PL/SQL construct called a cursor lets you name a work area and access its stored information A cursor is a mechanism used to fetch more than one row in a Pl/SQl block. 4. Difference between an implicit & an explicit cursor.

PL/SQL declares a cursor implicitly for all SQL data manipulation statements, including quries that return only one row. However,queries that return more than one row you must declare an explicit cursor or use a cursor FOR loop. Explicit cursor is a cursor in which the cursor name is explicitly assigned to a SELECT statement via the CURSOR...IS statement. An implicit cursor is used for all SQL statements Declare, Open, Fetch, Close. An explicit cursors are used to process multirow SELECT statements An implicit cursor is used to process INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and single row SELECT. .INTO statements. 5. What are cursor attributes %ROWCOUNT %NOTFOUND %FOUND %ISOPEN 6. What is a cursor for loop. Cursor For Loop is a loop where oracle implicitly declares a loop variable, the loop index that of the same record type as the cursor's record. 7. Difference between NO DATA FOUND and %NOTFOUND NO DATA FOUND is an exception raised only for the SELECT....INTO statements when the where clause of the querydoes not match any rows. When the where clause of the explicit cursor does not match any rows the %NOTFOUND attribute is set to TRUE instead. 8. What a SELECT FOR UPDATE cursor represent. SELECT......FROM......FOR......UPDATE[OF column-reference][NOWAIT] The processing done in a fetch loop modifies the rows that have been retrieved by the cursor. A convenient way of modifying the rows is done by a method with two parts: the FOR UPDATE clause in the cursor declaration, WHERE CURRENT OF CLAUSE in an UPDATE or declaration statement. 9. What 'WHERE CURRENT OF ' clause does in a cursor. LOOP
SELECT num_credits INTO v_numcredits FROM classes WHERE dept=123 and course=101; UPDATE students SET current_credits=current_credits+v_numcredits WHERE CURRENT OF X; END LOOP COMMIT; END;

10. What is use of a cursor variable? How it is defined. A cursor variable is associated with different statements at run time, which can hold different values at run time. Static cursors can only be associated with one run time query. A cursor variable is reference type(like a pointer in C). Declaring a cursor variable: TYPE type_name IS REF CURSOR RETURN return_type type_name is the name of the reference type,return_type is a record type indicating the types of the select list that will eventually be returned by the cursor variable. 11. What should be the return type for a cursor variable.Can we use a scalar data type as return type.

The return type for a cursor must be a record type.It can be declared explicitly as a userdefined or %ROWTYPE can be used. eg TYPE t_studentsref IS REF CURSOR RETURN students%ROWTYPE 12. How you open and close a cursor variable.Why it is required. OPEN cursor variable FOR SELECT...Statement CLOSE cursor variable In order to associate a cursor variable with a particular SELECT statement OPEN syntax is used.In order to free the resources used for the query CLOSE statement is used. 13. How you were passing cursor variables in PL/SQL 2.2. In PL/SQL 2.2 cursor variables cannot be declared in a package.This is because the storage for a cursor variable has to be allocated using Pro*C or OCI with version 2.2,the only means of passing a cursor variable to a PL/SQL block is via bind variable or a procedure parameter. 14. Can cursor variables be stored in PL/SQL tables.If yes how.If not why. No, a cursor variable points a row which cannot be stored in a two-dimensional PL/SQL table. 15. Difference between procedure and function. Functions are named PL/SQL blocks that return a value and can be called with arguments procedure a named block that can be called with parameter. A procedure all is a PL/SQL statement by itself, while a Function call is called as part of an expression. 16. What are different modes of parameters used in functions and procedures. IN OUT INOUT 17. What is difference between a formal and an actual parameter The variables declared in the procedure and which are passed, as arguments are called actual, the parameters in the procedure declaration. Actual parameters contain the values that are passed to a procedure and receive results. Formal parameters are the placeholders for the values of actual parameters 18. Can the default values be assigned to actual parameters. Yes 19. Can a function take OUT parameters.If not why. Yes. A function return a value, but can also have one or more OUT parameters. it is best practice, however to use a procedure rather than a function if you have multiple values to return. 20. What is syntax for dropping a procedure and a function .Are these operations possible.
Drop Procedure procedure_name Drop Function function_name

21. What are ORACLE PRECOMPILERS. Using ORACLE PRECOMPILERS ,SQL statements and PL/SQL blocks can be contained inside 3GL programs written in C,C++,COBOL,PASCAL, FORTRAN,PL/1 AND ADA. The Precompilers are known as Pro*C,Pro*Cobol,... This form of PL/SQL is known as embedded pl/sql,the language in which pl/sql is embedded is known as the host language. The prcompiler translates the embedded SQL and pl/sql ststements into calls to the precompiler

runtime library.The output must be compiled and linked with this library to creater an executable. 22. What is OCI. What are its uses. Oracle Call Interface is a method of accesing database from a 3GL program. Uses--No precompiler is required,PL/SQL blocks are executed like other DML statements.
The OCI library provides -functions to parse SQL statemets -bind input variables -bind output variables -execute statements -fetch the results

23. Difference between database triggers and form triggers. a) Data base trigger(DBT) fires when a DML operation is performed on a data base table.Form trigger(FT) Fires when user presses a key or navigates between fields on the screen b) Can be row level or statement level No distinction between row level and statement level. c) Can manipulate data stored in Oracle tables via SQL Can manipulate data in Oracle tables as well as variables in forms. d) Can be fired from any session executing the triggering DML statements. Can be fired only from the form that define the trigger. e) Can cause other database triggers to fire.Can cause other database triggers to fire,but not other form triggers. 24. What is an UTL_FILE.What are different procedures and functions associated with it. UTL_FILE is a package that adds the ability to read and write to operating system files Procedures associated with it are FCLOSE, FCLOSE_ALL and 5 procedures to output data to a file PUT, PUT_LINE, NEW_LINE, PUTF, FFLUSH.PUT, FFLUSH.PUT_LINE,FFLUSH.NEW_LINE. Functions associated with it are FOPEN, ISOPEN. 25. Can you use a commit statement within a database trigger. No 26. What is the maximum buffer size that can be specified using the DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE function? 1,000,000 [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. When looking at the estat events report you see that you are getting busy buffer waits. Is this bad? How can you find what is causing it Buffer busy waits could indicate contention in redo, rollback or data blocks. You need to check the v$waitstat view to see what areas are causing the problem. The value of the "count" column tells where the problem is, the "class" column tells you with what. UNDO is rollback segments, DATA is data base buffers. 2. If you see contention for library caches how can you fix it Increase the size of the shared pool.

3. If you see statistics that deal with "undo" what are they really talking about Rollback segments and associated structures. 4. If a tablespace has a default pctincrease of zero what will this cause (in relationship to the smon process) The SMON process won?t automatically coalesce its free space fragments. 5. If a tablespace shows excessive fragmentation what are some methods to defragment the tablespace? (7.1,7.2 and 7.3 only) In Oracle 7.0 to 7.2 The use of the 'alter session set events 'immediate trace name coalesce level ts#';? command is the easiest way to defragment contiguous free space fragmentation. The ts# parameter corresponds to the ts# value found in the ts$ SYS table. In version 7.3 the ?alter tablespace coalesce;? is best. If the free space isn?t contiguous then export, drop and import of the tablespace contents may be the only way to reclaim non-contiguous free space. 6. How can you tell if a tablespace has excessive fragmentation If a select against the dba_free_space table shows that the count of a tablespaces extents is greater than the count of its data files, then it is fragmented. 7. You see the following on a status report: redo log space requests 23 redo log space wait time 0 Is this something to worry about? What if redo log space wait time is high? How can you fix this Since the wait time is zero, no. If the wait time was high it might indicate a need for more or larger redo logs. 8. What can cause a high value for recursive calls? How can this be fixed A high value for recursive calls is cause by improper cursor usage, excessive dynamic space management actions, and or excessive statement re-parses. You need to determine the cause and correct it By either relinking applications to hold cursors, use proper space management techniques (proper storage and sizing) or ensure repeat queries are placed in packages for proper reuse. 9. If you see a pin hit ratio of less than 0.8 in the estat library cache report is this a problem? If so, how do you fix it This indicate that the shared pool may be too small. Increase the shared pool size. 10. If you see the value for reloads is high in the estat library cache report is this a matter for concern Yes, you should strive for zero reloads if possible. If you see excessive reloads then increase the size of the shared pool. 11. You look at the dba_rollback_segs view and see that there is a large number of shrinks and they are of relatively small size, is this a problem? How can it be fixed if it is a problem

A large number of small shrinks indicates a need to increase the size of the rollback segment extents. Ideally you should have no shrinks or a small number of large shrinks. To fix this just increase the size of the extents and adjust optimal accordingly. 12. You look at the dba_rollback_segs view and see that you have a large number of wraps is this a problem A large number of wraps indicates that your extent size for your rollback segments are probably too small. Increase the size of your extents to reduce the number of wraps. You can look at the average transaction size in the same view to get the information on transaction size. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. You have just started a new instance with a large SGA on a busy existing server. Performance is terrible, what should you check for The first thing to check with a large SGA is that it isn?t being swapped out. 2. What OS user should be used for the first part of an Oracle installation (on UNIX) You must use root first. 3. When should the default values for Oracle initialization parameters be used as is Never 4. How many control files should you have? Where should they be located At least 2 on separate disk spindles. Be sure they say on separate disks, not just file systems. 5. How many redo logs should you have and how should they be configured for maximum recoverability You should have at least three groups of two redo logs with the two logs each on a separate disk spindle (mirrored by Oracle). The redo logs should not be on raw devices on UNIX if it can be avoided. 6. You have a simple application with no "hot" tables (i.e. uniform IO and access requirements). How many disks should you have assuming standard layout for SYSTEM, USER, TEMP and ROLLBACK tablespaces At least 7, see disk configuration answer above. 7. Describe third normal form Something like: In third normal form all attributes in an entity are related to the primary key and only to the primary key 8. Is the following statement true or false: "All relational databases must be in third normal form" False. While 3NF is good for logical design most databases, if they have more than just a few tables, will not perform well using

full 3NF. Usually some entities will be denormalized in the logical to physical transfer process. 9. What is an ERD An ERD is an Entity-Relationship-Diagram. It is used to show the entities and relationships for a database logical model. 10. Why are recursive relationships bad? How do you resolve them A recursive relationship (one where a table relates to itself) is bad when it is a hard relationship (i.e. neither side is a "may" both are "must") as this can result in it not being possible to put in a top or perhaps a bottom of the table (for example in the EMPLOYEE table you couldn?t put in the PRESIDENT of the company because he has no boss, or the junior janitor because he has no subordinates). These type of relationships are usually resolved by adding a small intersection entity. 11. What does a hard one-to-one relationship mean (one where the relationship on both ends is "must") Expected answer: This means the two entities should probably be made into one entity. 12. How should a many-to-many relationship be handled By adding an intersection entity table 13. What is an artificial (derived) primary key? When should an artificial (or derived) primary key be used A derived key comes from a sequence. Usually it is used when a concatenated key becomes too cumbersome to use as a foreign key. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. When should you consider denormalization Whenever performance analysis indicates it would be beneficial to do so without compromising data integrity. 2. How can you determine if an Oracle instance is up from the operating system level There are several base Oracle processes that will be running on multi-user operating systems, these will be smon, pmon, dbwr and lgwr. Any answer that has them using their operating system process showing feature to check for these is acceptable. For example, on UNIX a ps -ef|grep dbwr will show what instances are up. 3. Users from the PC clients are getting messages indicating : ORA-06114: (Cnct err, can't get err txt. See Servr Msgs & Codes Manual) What could the problem be The instance name is probably incorrect in their connection string.

4. Users from the PC clients are getting the following error stack: ERROR: ORA-01034: ORACLE not available ORA-07318: smsget: open error when opening sgadef.dbf file. HPUX Error: 2: No such file or directory What is the probable cause The Oracle instance is shutdown that they are trying to access, restart the instance. 5. How can you determine if the SQLNET process is running for SQLNET V1? How about V2 For SQLNET V1 check for the existence of the orasrv process. You can use the command "tcpctl status" to get a full status of the V1 TCPIP server, other protocols have similar command formats. For SQLNET V2 check for the presence of the LISTENER process(s) or you can issue the command "lsnrctl status". 6. What file will give you Oracle instance status information? Where is it located The alert.ora log. It is located in the directory specified by the background_dump_dest parameter in the v$parameter table. 7. Users aren?t being allowed on the system. The following message is received: ORA00257 archiver is stuck. Connect internal only, until freed What is the problem The archive destination is probably full, backup the archive logs and remove them and the archiver will re-start. 8. Where would you look to find out if a redo log was corrupted assuming you are using Oracle mirrored redo logs There is no message that comes to the SQLDBA or SRVMGR programs during startup in this situation, you must check the alert.log file for this information. 9. You attempt to add a datafile and get: ORA-01118: cannot add anymore datafiles: limit of 40 exceeded What is the problem and how can you fix it When the database was created the db_files parameter in the initialization file was set to 40. You can shutdown and reset this to a higher value, up to the value of MAX_DATAFILES as specified at database creation. If the MAX_DATAFILES is set to low, you will have to rebuild the control file to increase it before proceeding. 10. You look at your fragmentation report and see that smon hasn?t coalesced any of you tablespaces, even though you know several have large chunks of contiguous free extents. What is the problem Check the dba_tablespaces view for the value of pct_increase for the tablespaces. If pct_increase is zero, smon will not coalesce their free space. 11. Your users get the following error: ORA-00055 maximum number of DML locks exceeded What is the problem and how do you fix it The number of DML Locks is set by the

initialization parameter DML_LOCKS. If this value is set to low (which it is by default) you will get this error. Increase the value of DML_LOCKS. If you are sure that this is just a temporary problem, you can have them wait and then try again later and the error should clear. 12. You get a call from you backup DBA while you are on vacation. He has corrupted all of the control files while playing with the ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE command. What do you do As long as all datafiles are safe and he was successful with the BACKUP controlfile command you can do the following: CONNECT INTERNAL STARTUP MOUNT (Take any read-only tablespaces offline before next step ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE .... OFFLINE;) RECOVER DATABASE USING BACKUP CONTROLFILE ALTER DATABASE OPEN RESETLOGS; (bring read-only tablespaces back online) Shutdown and backup the system, then restart If they have a recent output file from the ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROL FILE TO TRACE; command, they can use that to recover as well. If no backup of the control file is available then the following will be required: CONNECT INTERNAL STARTUP NOMOUNT CREATE CONTROL FILE .....; However, they will need to know all of the datafiles, logfiles, and settings for MAXLOGFILES, MAXLOGMEMBERS, MAXLOGHISTORY, MAXDATAFILES for the database to use the command. [edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. How would you determine the time zone under which a database was operating? 2. Explain the use of setting GLOBAL_NAMES equal to TRUE. 3. What command would you use to encrypt a PL/SQL application? 4. Explain the difference between a FUNCTION, PROCEDURE and PACKAGE. 5. Explain the use of table functions. 6. Name three advisory statistics you can collect. 7. Where in the Oracle directory tree structure are audit traces placed? 8. Explain materialized views and how they are used. 9. When a user process fails, what background process cleans up after it? 10. What background process refreshes materialized views? 11. How would you determine what sessions are connected and what resources they are waiting for? 12. Describe what redo logs are. 13. How would you force a log switch? 14. Give two methods you could use to determine what DDL changes have been made. 15. What does coalescing a tablespace do? 16. What is the difference between a TEMPORARY tablespace and a PERMANENT tablespace? 17. Name a tablespace automatically created when you create a database. 18. When creating a user, what permissions must you grant to allow them to connect to the database? 19. How do you add a data file to a tablespace? 20. How do you resize a data file? 21. What view would you use to look at the size of a data file? 22. What view would you use to determine free space in a tablespace? 23. How would you determine who has added a row to a table? 24. How can you rebuild an index? 25. Explain what partitioning is and what its benefit is. 26. You have just compiled a PL/SQL package but got errors, how would you view the errors? 27. How can you gather statistics on a table? 28. How can you enable a trace for a session? 29. What is the difference between the SQL*Loader and IMPORT utilities? 30. Name two files used for network connection to a database.

[edit] Oracle Interview Questions 1. In a system with an average of 40 concurrent users you get the following from a query on rollback extents: ROLLBACK CUR EXTENTS -------------------------R01 11 R02 8 R03 12 R04 9 SYSTEM 4 2. You have room for each to grow by 20 more extents each. Is there a problem? Should you take any action No there is not a problem. You have 40 extents showing and an average of 40 concurrent users. Since there is plenty of room to grow no action is needed. 3. You see multiple extents in the temporary tablespace. Is this a problem As long as they are all the same size this isn?t a problem. In fact, it can even improve performance since Oracle won?t have to create a new extent when a user needs one. 4. Define OFA. OFA stands for Optimal Flexible Architecture. It is a method of placing directories and files in an Oracle system so that you get the maximum flexibility for future tuning and file placement. 5. How do you set up your tablespace on installation The answer here should show an understanding of separation of redo and rollback, data and indexes and isolation os SYSTEM tables from other tables. An example would be to specify that at least 7 disks should be used for an Oracle installation so that you can place SYSTEM tablespace on one, redo logs on two (mirrored redo logs) the TEMPORARY tablespace on another, ROLLBACK tablespace on another and still have two for DATA and INDEXES. They should indicate how they will handle archive logs and exports as well. As long as they have a logical plan for combining or further separation more or less disks can be specified. 6. What should be done prior to installing Oracle (for the OS and the disks) adjust kernel parameters or OS tuning parameters in accordance with installation guide. Be sure enough contiguous disk space is available. 7. You have installed Oracle and you are now setting up the actual instance. You have been waiting an hour for the initialization script to finish, what should you check first to determine if there is a problem Check to make sure that the archiver isn?t stuck. If archive logging is turned on during install a large number of logs will be created. This can fill up your archive log destination causing Oracle to stop to wait for more space. 8. When configuring SQLNET on the server what files must be set up

INITIALIZATION file, TNSNAMES.ORA file, SQLNET.ORA file 9. When configuring SQLNET on the client what files need to be set up SQLNET.ORA, TNSNAMES.ORA 10. What must be installed with ODBC on the client in order for it to work with Oracle SQLNET and PROTOCOL (for example: TCPIP adapter) layers of the transport programs. [edit]

General Oracle Questions

What

Oracle products have you worked with? What version of Oracle were you running? Compare Oracle to any other database that you know. Why would you prefer to work on one and not on the other? [edit] Oracle DBA Questions Typical DBA questions: How many databases and what sizes? Did you use online or off-line backups? Why? If you have to advise a backup strategy for a new application, how would you approach it and what questions will you ask? If a customer calls you about a hanging database session, what will you do to resolve it? How many control files and redo logs should a database have? [edit] Oracle Developer Questions Typical Developer questions: Tell us about the projects you've worked on. What language was the application written in? What programming languages are you familiar with? What technologies did you use? [edit] Technical Oracle Questions To test your technical knowledge, try one of the OraFAQ Quizzes. Category: Career management

PL/SQL Questions
1. Describe the difference between a procedure, function and anonymous pl/sql block. Level: Low Expected answer : Candidate should mention use of DECLARE statement, a function must return a value while a procedure doesn't have to. Also one can use function in Select Sql statement but not procedure. 2. What is a mutating table error and how can you get around it? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: This happens with triggers. It occurs because the trigger is trying to update a row it is currently using. The usual fix involves either use of views or temporary tables so the database is selecting from one while updating the other. 3. Describe the use of %ROWTYPE and %TYPE in PL/SQL Level: Low Expected answer: %ROWTYPE allows you to associate a variable with an entire table row. The %TYPE associates a variable with a single column type. 4. What packages (if any) has Oracle provided for use by developers? Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: Oracle provides the DBMS_ series of packages. There are many which developers should be aware of such as DBMS_SQL, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_TRANSACTION, DBMS_LOCK, DBMS_ALERT, DBMS_OUTPUT, DBMS_JOB, DBMS_UTILITY, DBMS_DDL, UTL_FILE. If they can mention a few of these and describe how they used them, even better. If they include the SQL routines provided by Oracle, great, but not really what was asked. 5. Describe the use of PL/SQL tables Level: Intermediate Expected answer: PL/SQL tables are scalar arrays that can be referenced by a binary integer. They can be used to hold values for use in later queries or calculations. In Oracle they will be able to be of the %ROWTYPE designation, or RECORD. 6. When is a declare statement needed ? Level: Low The DECLARE statement is used in PL/SQL anonymous blocks such as with stand alone, non-stored PL/SQL procedures. It must come first in a PL/SQL stand alone file if it is used.

7. In what order should a open/fetch/loop set of commands in a PL/SQL block be implemented if you use the %NOTFOUND cursor variable in the exit when statement? Why? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: OPEN then FETCH then LOOP followed by the exit when. If not specified in this order will result in the final return being done twice because of the way the %NOTFOUND is handled by PL/SQL. 8. What are SQLCODE and SQLERRM and why are they important for PL/SQL developers? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: SQLCODE returns the value of the error number for the last error encountered. The SQLERRM returns the actual error message for the last error encountered. They can be used in exception handling to report, or, store in an error log table, the error that occurred in the code. These are especially useful for the WHEN OTHERS exception. 9. How can you find within a PL/SQL block, if a cursor is open? Level: Low Expected answer: Use the %ISOPEN cursor status variable. 10. How can you generate debugging output from PL/SQL? Level:Intermediate to high Expected answer: Use the DBMS_OUTPUT package. The DBMS_OUTPUT package can be used to show intermediate results from loops and the status of variables as the procedure is executed, however output only occurs after processing is finished, which might not be useful if processing takes a long time. The package UTL_FILE can be used to write to a file, but one must have write access to the output directory. A third possibility is to create a log table and have the procedure write to the table. This will give you debugging information in real time. 11. What are the types of triggers? Level:Intermediate to high Expected Answer: There are 12 types of triggers in PL/SQL that consist of combinations of the BEFORE, AFTER, ROW, TABLE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and ALL key words: BEFORE ALL ROW INSERT AFTER ALL ROW INSERT BEFORE INSERT AFTER INSERT etc.

[edit] DBA
1. Give one method for transferring a table from one schema to another: Level:Intermediate Expected Answer: There are several possible methods, export-import, CREATE TABLE... AS SELECT, or COPY. 2. What is the purpose of the IMPORT option IGNORE? What is it's default setting? Level: Low Expected Answer: The IMPORT IGNORE option tells import to ignore "already exists" errors. If it is not specified the tables that already exist will be skipped. If it is specified, the error is ignored and the tables data will be inserted. The default value is N. 3. You have a rollback segment in a version 7.2 database that has expanded beyond optimal, how can it be restored to optimal? Level: Low Expected answer: Use the ALTER TABLESPACE ..... SHRINK command. 4. If the DEFAULT and TEMPORARY tablespace clauses are left out of a CREATE USER command what happens? Is this bad or good? Why? Level: Low Expected answer: The user is assigned the SYSTEM tablespace as a default and temporary tablespace. This is bad because it causes user objects and temporary segments to be placed into the SYSTEM tablespace resulting in fragmentation and improper table placement (only data dictionary objects and the system rollback segment should be in SYSTEM). 5. What are some of the Oracle provided packages that DBAs should be aware of? Level: Intermediate to High Expected answer: Oracle provides a number of packages in the form of the DBMS_ packages owned by the SYS user. The packages used by DBAs may include: DBMS_SHARED_POOL, DBMS_UTILITY, DBMS_SQL, DBMS_DDL, DBMS_SESSION, DBMS_OUTPUT and DBMS_SNAPSHOT. They may also try to answer with the UTL*.SQL or CAT*.SQL series of SQL procedures. These can be viewed as extra credit but aren?t part of the answer. 6. What happens if the constraint name is left out of a constraint clause?

Level: Low Expected answer: The Oracle system will use the default name of SYS_Cxxxx where xxxx is a system generated number. This is bad since it makes tracking which table the constraint belongs to or what the constraint does harder. 7. What happens if a tablespace clause is left off of a primary key constraint clause? Level: Low Expected answer: This results in the index that is automatically generated being placed in then users default tablespace. Since this will usually be the same tablespace as the table is being created in, this can cause serious performance problems. 8. What is the proper method for disabling and re-enabling a primary key constraint? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: You use the ALTER TABLE command for both. However, for the enable clause you must specify the USING INDEX and TABLESPACE clause for primary keys. 9. What happens if a primary key constraint is disabled and then enabled without fully specifying the index clause? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The index is created in the user?s default tablespace and all sizing information is lost. Oracle doesn?t store this information as a part of the constraint definition, but only as part of the index definition, when the constraint was disabled the index was dropped and the information is gone. 10. (On UNIX) When should more than one DB writer process be used? How many should be used? Level: High Expected answer: If the UNIX system being used is capable of asynchronous IO then only one is required, if the system is not capable of asynchronous IO then up to twice the number of disks used by Oracle number of DB writers should be specified by use of the db_writers initialization parameter. 11. You are using hot backup without being in archivelog mode, can you recover in the event of a failure? Why or why not? Level: High Expected answer: You can't use hot backup without being in archivelog mode. So no, you couldn't recover. 12. What causes the "snapshot too old" error? How can this be prevented or mitigated?

Level: Intermediate Expected answer: This is caused by large or long running transactions that have either wrapped onto their own rollback space or have had another transaction write on part of their rollback space. This can be prevented or mitigated by breaking the transaction into a set of smaller transactions or increasing the size of the rollback segments and their extents. 13. How can you tell if a database object is invalid? Level: Low Expected answer: By checking the STATUS column of the DBA_, ALL_ or USER_OBJECTS views, depending upon whether you own or only have permission on the view or are using a DBA account. 14. A user is getting an ORA-00942 error yet you know you have granted them permission on the table, what else should you check? Level: Low Expected answer: You need to check that the user has specified the full name of the object (SELECT empid FROM scott.emp; instead of SELECT empid FROM emp;) or has a synonym that points to the object (CREATE SYNONYM emp FOR scott.emp;) 15. A developer is trying to create a view and the database won?t let him. He has the "DEVELOPER" role which has the "CREATE VIEW" system privilege and SELECT grants on the tables he is using, what is the problem? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: You need to verify the developer has direct grants on all tables used in the view. You can't create a stored object with grants given through a role. 16. If you have an example table, what is the best way to get sizing data for the production table implementation? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The best way is to analyze the table and then use the data provided in the DBA_TABLES view to get the average row length and other pertinent data for the calculation. The quick and dirty way is to look at the number of blocks the table is actually using and ratio the number of rows in the table to its number of blocks against the number of expected rows. 17. How can you find out how many users are currently logged into the database? How can you find their operating system id? Level: high Expected answer: There are several ways. One is to look at the v$session or v$process views. Another way is to check the current_logins parameter in the v$sysstat view. Another if you are on UNIX is to do a "ps -ef|grep oracle|wc -l? command, but this only works against a single instance installation. 18. A user selects from a sequence and gets back two values, his select is:

SELECT pk_seq.nextval FROM dual; What is the problem? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Somehow two values have been inserted into the dual table. This table is a single row, single column table that should only have one value in it. 19. How can you determine if an index needs to be dropped and rebuilt? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Run the ANALYZE INDEX command on the index to validate its structure and then calculate the ratio of LF_BLK_LEN/LF_BLK_LEN+BR_BLK_LEN and if it isn?t near 1.0 (i.e. greater than 0.7 or so) then the index should be rebuilt. Or if the ratio BR_BLK_LEN/ LF_BLK_LEN+BR_BLK_LEN is nearing 0.3.

[edit] SQL/ SQLPlus

1. How can variables be passed to a SQL routine? Level: Low Expected answer: By use of the & symbol. For passing in variables the numbers 1-8 can be used (&1, &2,...,&8) to pass the values after the command into the SQLPLUS session. To be prompted for a specific variable, place the ampersanded variable in the code itself: "select * from dba_tables where owner=&owner_name;" . Use of double ampersands tells SQLPLUS to resubstitute the value for each subsequent use of the variable, a single ampersand will cause a reprompt for the value unless an ACCEPT statement is used to get the value from the user. 2. You want to include a carriage return/linefeed in your output from a SQL script, how can you do this? Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: The best method is to use the CHR() function (CHR(10) is a return/linefeed) and the concatenation function "||". Another method, although it is hard to document and isn?t always portable is to use the return/linefeed as a part of a quoted string. 3. How can you call a PL/SQL procedure from SQL? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: By use of the EXECUTE (short form EXEC) command. 4. How do you execute a host operating system command from within SQL? Level: Low

Expected answer: By use of the exclamation point "!" (in UNIX and some other OS) or the HOST (HO) command. 5. You want to use SQL to build SQL, what is this called and give an example Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: This is called dynamic SQL. An example would be: set lines 90 pages 0 termout off feedback off verify off spool drop_all.sql select ?drop user ?||username||? cascade;? from dba_users where username not in ('SYS','SYSTEM'); spool off Essentially you are looking to see that they know to include a command (in this case DROP USER...CASCADE;) and that you need to concatenate using the ?||? the values selected from the database. Alternately, if you are using PL/SQL, you can do ls_sql_string := 'CREATE TABLE FRED AS SELECT SYSDATE A_DATE FROM DUAL'; EXECUTE IMMEDIATE ls_sql_string; 6. What SQLPlus command is used to format output from a select? Level: low Expected answer: This is best done with the COLUMN command. 7. You want to group the following set of select returns, what can you group on? Max(sum_of_cost), min(sum_of_cost), count(item_no), item_no Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The only column that can be grouped on is the "item_no" column, the rest have aggregate functions associated with them. 8. What special Oracle feature allows you to specify how the cost based system treats a SQL statement? Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: The COST based system allows the use of HINTs to control the optimizer path selection. If they can give some example hints such as FIRST ROWS, ALL ROWS, USING INDEX, STAR, even better. 9. You want to determine the location of identical rows in a table before attempting to place a unique index on the table, how can this be done? Level: High Expected answer: Oracle tables always have one guaranteed unique column, the rowid column. If you use a min/max function against your rowid and then select against the proposed primary key you can squeeze out the rowids of the duplicate rows pretty quick. For example: select rowid from emp e where e.rowid > (select min(x.rowid) from emp x where x.emp_no = e.emp_no); In the situation where multiple columns make up the proposed key, they must all be used in the where clause. 10. What is a Cartesian product?

Level: Low Expected answer: A Cartesian product is the result of an unrestricted join of two or more tables. The result set of a three table Cartesian product will have x * y * z number of rows where x, y, z correspond to the number of rows in each table involved in the join. 11. You are joining a local and a remote table, the network manager complains about the traffic involved, how can you reduce the network traffic? Level: High Expected answer: Push the processing of the remote data to the remote instance by using a view to preselect the information for the join. This will result in only the data required for the join being sent across. 12. What is the default ordering of an ORDER BY clause in a SELECT statement? Level: Low Expected answer: Ascending 13. What is tkprof and how is it used? Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: The tkprof tool is a tuning tool used to determine cpu and execution times for SQL statements. You use it by first setting timed_statistics to true in the initialization file and then turning on tracing for either the entire database via the sql_trace parameter or for the session using the ALTER SESSION command. Once the trace file is generated you run the tkprof tool against the trace file and then look at the output from the tkprof tool. This can also be used to generate explain plan output. 14. What is explain plan and how is it used? Level: Intermediate to high Expected answer: The EXPLAIN PLAN command is a tool to tune SQL statements. To use it you must have an explain_table generated in the user you are running the explain plan for. This is created using the utlxplan.sql script. Once the explain plan table exists you run the explain plan command giving as its argument the SQL statement to be explained. The explain_plan table is then queried to see the execution plan of the statement. Explain plans can also be run using tkprof. 15. How do you set the number of lines on a page of output? The width? Level: Low Expected answer: The SET command in SQLPLUS is used to control the number of lines generated per page and the width of those lines, for example SET PAGESIZE 60 LINESIZE 80 will generate reports that are 60 lines long with a line width of 80 characters. The PAGESIZE and LINESIZE options can be shortened to PAGES and LINES.

16. How do you prevent output from coming to the screen? Level: Low Expected answer: The SET option TERMOUT controls output to the screen. Setting TERMOUT OFF turns off screen output. This option can be shortened to TERM. 17. How do you prevent Oracle from giving you informational messages during and after a SQL statement execution? Level: Low Expected answer: The SET options FEEDBACK and VERIFY can be set to OFF. 18. How do you generate file output from SQL? Level: Low Expected answer: By use of the SPOOL command

[edit] Tuning Questions

1. A tablespace has a table with 30 extents in it. Is this bad? Why or why not. Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Multiple extents in and of themselves aren?t bad. However if you also have chained rows this can hurt performance. 2. How do you set up tablespaces during an Oracle installation? Level: Low Expected answer: You should always attempt to use the Oracle Flexible Architecture standard or another partitioning scheme to ensure proper separation of SYSTEM, ROLLBACK, REDO LOG, DATA, TEMPORARY and INDEX segments. 3. You see multiple fragments in the SYSTEM tablespace, what should you check first? Level: Low Expected answer: Ensure that users don?t have the SYSTEM tablespace as their TEMPORARY or DEFAULT tablespace assignment by checking the DBA_USERS view.

4. What are some indications that you need to increase the SHARED_POOL_SIZE parameter? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Poor data dictionary or library cache hit ratios, getting error ORA-04031. Another indication is steadily decreasing performance with all other tuning parameters the same. 5. What is the general guideline for sizing db_block_size and db_multi_block_read for an application that does many full table scans? Level: High Expected answer: Oracle almost always reads in 64k chunks. The two should have a product equal to 64 or a multiple of 64. 6. What is the fastest query method for a table? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Fetch by rowid 7. Explain the use of TKPROF? What initialization parameter should be turned on to get full TKPROF output? Level: High Expected answer: The tkprof tool is a tuning tool used to determine cpu and execution times for SQL statements. You use it by first setting timed_statistics to true in the initialization file and then turning on tracing for either the entire database via the sql_trace parameter or for the session using the ALTER SESSION command. Once the trace file is generated you run the tkprof tool against the trace file and then look at the output from the tkprof tool. This can also be used to generate explain plan output. 8. When looking at v$sysstat you see that sorts (disk) is high. Is this bad or good? If bad -How do you correct it? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: If you get excessive disk sorts this is bad. This indicates you need to tune the sort area parameters in the initialization files. The major sort are parameter is the SORT_AREA_SIZe parameter. 9. When should you increase copy latches? What parameters control copy latches? Level: high Expected answer: When you get excessive contention for the copy latches as shown by the "redo copy" latch hit ratio. You can increase copy latches via the initialization parameter LOG_SIMULTANEOUS_COPIES to twice the number of CPUs on your system. 10. Where can you get a list of all initialization parameters for your instance? How about an indication if they are default settings or have been changed?

Level: Low Expected answer: You can look in the init.ora file for an indication of manually set parameters. For all parameters, their value and whether or not the current value is the default value, look in the v$parameter view. 11. Describe hit ratio as it pertains to the database buffers. What is the difference between instantaneous and cumulative hit ratio and which should be used for tuning? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The hit ratio is a measure of how many times the database was able to read a value from the buffers verses how many times it had to re-read a data value from the disks. A value greater than 8090% is good, less could indicate problems. If you simply take the ratio of existing parameters this will be a cumulative value since the database started. If you do a comparison between pairs of readings based on some arbitrary time span, this is the instantaneous ratio for that time span. Generally speaking an instantaneous reading gives more valuable data since it will tell you what your instance is doing for the time it was generated over. 12. Discuss row chaining, how does it happen? How can you reduce it? How do you correct it? Level: high Expected answer: Row chaining occurs when a VARCHAR2 value is updated and the length of the new value is longer than the old value and won?t fit in the remaining block space. This results in the row chaining to another block. It can be reduced by setting the storage parameters on the table to appropriate values. It can be corrected by export and import of the effected table. 13. When looking at the estat events report you see that you are getting busy buffer waits. Is this bad? How can you find what is causing it? Level: high Expected answer: Buffer busy waits could indicate contention in redo, rollback or data blocks. You need to check the v$waitstat view to see what areas are causing the problem. The value of the "count" column tells where the problem is, the "class" column tells you with what. UNDO is rollback segments, DATA is data base buffers. 14. If you see contention for library caches how can you fix it? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Increase the size of the shared pool. 15. If you see statistics that deal with "undo" what are they really talking about?

Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Rollback segments and associated structures. 16. If a tablespace has a default pctincrease of zero what will this cause (in relationship to the smon process)? Level: High Expected answer: The SMON process won?t automatically coalesce its free space fragments. 17. If a tablespace shows excessive fragmentation what are some methods to defragment the tablespace? (7.1,7.2 and 7.3 only) Level: High Expected answer: In Oracle 7.0 to 7.2 The use of the 'alter session set events 'immediate trace name coalesce level ts#';? command is the easiest way to defragment contiguous free space fragmentation. The ts# parameter corresponds to the ts# value found in the ts$ SYS table. In version 7.3 the ?alter tablespace coalesce;? is best. If the free space isn?t contiguous then export, drop and import of the tablespace contents may be the only way to reclaim non-contiguous free space. 18. How can you tell if a tablespace has excessive fragmentation? Level: Intermediate If a select against the dba_free_space table shows that the count of a tablespaces extents is greater than the count of its data files, then it is fragmented. 19. You see the following on a status report: redo log space requests 23 redo log space wait time 0 Is this something to worry about? What if redo log space wait time is high? How can you fix this? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Since the wait time is zero, no. If the wait time was high it might indicate a need for more or larger redo logs. 20. What can cause a high value for recursive calls? How can this be fixed? Level: High Expected answer: A high value for recursive calls is cause by improper cursor usage, excessive dynamic space management actions, and or excessive statement re-parses. You need to determine the cause and correct it By either relinking applications to hold cursors, use proper space management techniques (proper storage and sizing) or ensure repeat queries are placed in packages for proper reuse.

21. If you see a pin hit ratio of less than 0.8 in the estat library cache report is this a problem? If so, how do you fix it? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: This indicate that the shared pool may be too small. Increase the shared pool size. 22. If you see the value for reloads is high in the estat library cache report is this a matter for concern? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Yes, you should strive for zero reloads if possible. If you see excessive reloads then increase the size of the shared pool. 23. You look at the dba_rollback_segs view and see that there is a large number of shrinks and they are of relatively small size, is this a problem? How can it be fixed if it is a problem? Level: High Expected answer: A large number of small shrinks indicates a need to increase the size of the rollback segment extents. Ideally you should have no shrinks or a small number of large shrinks. To fix this just increase the size of the extents and adjust optimal accordingly. 24. You look at the dba_rollback_segs view and see that you have a large number of wraps is this a problem? Level: High Expected answer: A large number of wraps indicates that your extent size for your rollback segments are probably too small. Increase the size of your extents to reduce the number of wraps. You can look at the average transaction size in the same view to get the information on transaction size. 25. In a system with an average of 40 concurrent users you get the following from a query on rollback extents: ROLLBACK CUR EXTENTS
--------------------------

R01 11 R02 8 R03 12 R04 9 SYSTEM 4 You have room for each to grow by 20 more extents each. Is there a problem? Should you take any action? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: No there is not a problem. You have 40 extents showing and an average of 40 concurrent users. Since there is plenty of room to grow no action is needed. 26. You see multiple extents in the temporary tablespace. Is this a problem?

Level: Intermediate Expected answer: As long as they are all the same size this isn?t a problem. In fact, it can even improve performance since Oracle won?t have to create a new extent when a user needs one.

[edit] Installation/Configuration
1. Define OFA. Level: Low Expected answer: OFA stands for Optimal Flexible Architecture. It is a method of placing directories and files in an Oracle system so that you get the maximum flexibility for future tuning and file placement. 2. How do you set up your tablespace on installation? Level: Low Expected answer: The answer here should show an understanding of separation of redo and rollback, data and indexes and isolation os SYSTEM tables from other tables. An example would be to specify that at least 7 disks should be used for an Oracle installation so that you can place SYSTEM tablespace on one, redo logs on two (mirrored redo logs) the TEMPORARY tablespace on another, ROLLBACK tablespace on another and still have two for DATA and INDEXES. They should indicate how they will handle archive logs and exports as well. As long as they have a logical plan for combining or further separation more or less disks can be specified. 3. What should be done prior to installing Oracle (for the OS and the disks)? Level: Low Expected Answer: adjust kernel parameters or OS tuning parameters in accordance with installation guide. Be sure enough contiguous disk space is available. 4. You have installed Oracle and you are now setting up the actual instance. You have been waiting an hour for the initialization script to finish, what should you check first to determine if there is a problem? Level: Intermediate to high Expected Answer: Check to make sure that the archiver isn?t stuck. If archive logging is turned on during install a large number of logs will be created. This can fill up your archive log destination causing Oracle to stop to wait for more space. 5. When configuring SQLNET on the server what files must be set up? Level: Intermediate

Expected answer: INITIALIZATION file, TNSNAMES.ORA file, SQLNET.ORA file 6. When configuring SQLNET on the client what files need to be set up? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: SQLNET.ORA, TNSNAMES.ORA 7. What must be installed with ODBC on the client in order for it to work with Oracle? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: SQLNET and PROTOCOL (for example: TCPIP adapter) layers of the transport programs. 8. You have just started a new instance with a large SGA on a busy existing server. Performance is terrible, what should you check for? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The first thing to check with a large SGA is that it isn?t being swapped out. 9. What OS user should be used for the first part of an Oracle installation (on UNIX)? Level: low Expected answer: You must use root first. 10. When should the default values for Oracle initialization parameters be used as is? Level: Low Expected answer: Never 11. How many control files should you have? Where should they be located? Level: Low Expected answer: At least 2 on separate disk spindles. Be sure they say on separate disks, not just file systems. 12. How many redo logs should you have and how should they be configured for maximum recoverability? Level: Intermediate

Expected answer: You should have at least three groups of two redo logs with the two logs each on a separate disk spindle (mirrored by Oracle). The redo logs should not be on raw devices on UNIX if it can be avoided. 13. You have a simple application with no "hot" tables (i.e. uniform IO and access requirements). How many disks should you have assuming standard layout for SYSTEM, USER, TEMP and ROLLBACK tablespaces? Expected answer: At least 7, see disk configuration answer above.

[edit] Data Modeler

1. Describe third normal form? Level: Low Expected answer: Something like: In third normal form all attributes in an entity are related to the primary key and only to the primary key 2. Is the following statement true or false: "All relational databases must be in third normal form" Why or why not? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: False. While 3NF is good for logical design most databases, if they have more than just a few tables, will not perform well using full 3NF. Usually some entities will be denormalized in the logical to physical transfer process. 3. What is an ERD? Level: Low Expected answer: An ERD is an Entity-Relationship-Diagram. It is used to show the entities and relationships for a database logical model. 4. Why are recursive relationships bad? How do you resolve them? Level: Intermediate A recursive relationship (one where a table relates to itself) is bad when it is a hard relationship (i.e. neither side is a "may" both are "must") as this can result in it not being possible to put in a top or perhaps a bottom of the table (for example in the EMPLOYEE table you couldn?t put in the PRESIDENT of the company because he has no boss, or the junior janitor because he has no subordinates). These type of relationships are usually resolved by adding a small intersection entity. 5. What does a hard one-to-one relationship mean (one where the relationship on both ends is "must")? Level: Low to intermediate Expected answer: This means the two entities should probably be made into one entity. 6. How should a many-to-many relationship be handled? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: By adding an intersection entity table 7. What is an artificial (derived) primary key? When should an artificial (or derived) primary key be used? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: A derived key comes from a sequence. Usually it is used when a concatenated key becomes too cumbersome to use as a foreign key.

8. When should you consider denormalization? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: Whenever performance analysis indicates it would be beneficial to do so without compromising data integrity.

[edit] UNIX
1. How can you determine the space left in a file system? Level: Low Expected answer: There are several commands to do this: du, df, or bdf 2. How can you determine the number of SQLNET users logged in to the UNIX system? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: SQLNET users will show up with a process unique name that begins with oracle, if you do a ps -ef|grep oracle|wc -l you can get a count of the number of users. 3. What command is used to type files to the screen? Level: Low Expected answer: cat, more, pg 4. What command is used to remove a file? Level: Low Expected answer: rm 5. Can you remove an open file under UNIX? Level: Low Expected answer: yes 6. How do you create a decision tree in a shell script? Level: intermediate Expected answer: depending on shell, usually a case-esac or an if-endif or fi structure 7. What is the purpose of the grep command? Level: Low Expected answer: grep is a string search command that parses the specified string from the specified file or files 8. The system has a program that always includes the word nocomp in its name, how can you determine the number of processes that are using this program? Level: intermediate Expected answer: ps -ef|grep *nocomp*|wc -l 9. What is an inode? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: an inode is a file status indicator. It is stored in both disk and memory and tracts file status. There is one inode for each file on the system. 10. The system administrator tells you that the system hasn?t been rebooted in 6 months, should he be proud of this? Level: High Expected answer: Maybe. Some UNIX systems don?t clean up well after themselves. Inode problems and dead user processes can accumulate causing possible performance and corruption problems. Most UNIX systems should have a scheduled periodic reboot so file systems can be checked and cleaned and dead or zombie processes cleared out. 11. What is redirection and how is it used? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: redirection is the process by which input or output to or from a process is redirected to another process. This can be done using the pipe symbol "|", the greater than symbol ">" or the "tee" command. This is one of the strengths of UNIX allowing the output from one command to be redirected directly into the input of another command.

12. How can you find dead processes? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: ps -ef|grep zombie -- or -- who -d depending on the system. 13. How can you find all the processes on your system? Level: Low Expected answer: Use the ps command 14. How can you find your id on a system? Level: Low Expected answer: Use the "who am i" command. 15. What is the finger command? Level: Low Expected answer: The finger command uses data in the passwd file to give information on system users. 16. What is the easiest method to create a file on UNIX? Level: Low Expected answer: Use the touch command 17. What does >> do? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: The ">>" redirection symbol appends the output from the command specified into the file specified. The file must already have been created. 18. If you aren?t sure what command does a particular UNIX function what is the best way to determine the command? Expected answer: The UNIX man -k command will search the man pages for the value specified. Review the results from the command to find the command of interest.

[edit] Oracle Troubleshooting

1. How can you determine if an Oracle instance is up from the operating system level? Level: Low Expected answer: There are several base Oracle processes that will be running on multi-user operating systems, these will be smon, pmon, dbwr and lgwr. Any answer that has them using their operating system process showing feature to check for these is acceptable. For example, on UNIX a ps -ef|grep pmon will show what instances are up. 2. Users from the PC clients are getting messages indicating : Level: Low ORA-06114: (Cnct err, can't get err txt. See Servr Msgs & Codes Manual) What could the problem be? Expected answer: The instance name is probably incorrect in their connection string. 3. Users from the PC clients are getting the following error stack: Level: Low ERROR: ORA-01034: ORACLE not available ORA-07318: smsget: open error when opening sgadef.dbf file. HP-UX Error: 2: No such file or directory What is the probable cause? Expected answer: The Oracle instance is shutdown that they are trying to access, restart the instance. 4. How can you determine if the SQLNET process is running for SQLNET V1? How about V2? Level: Low Expected answer: For SQLNET V1 check for the existence of the orasrv process. You can use the command "tcpctl status" to get a full status of the V1 TCPIP server, other protocols have similar command formats. For SQLNET V2 check for the presence of the LISTENER process(s) or you can issue the command "lsnrctl status".

5. What file will give you Oracle instance status information? Where is it located? Level: Low Expected answer: The alert.ora log. It is located in the directory specified by the background_dump_dest parameter in the v$parameter table. 6. Users aren?t being allowed on the system. The following message is received: Level: Intermediate ORA00257 archiver is stuck. Connect internal only, until freed What is the problem? Expected answer: The archive destination is probably full, backup the archive logs and remove them and the archiver will re-start. 7. Where would you look to find out if a redo log was corrupted assuming you are using Oracle mirrored redo logs? Level: Intermediate Expected answer: There is no message that comes to the SQLDBA or SRVMGR programs during startup in this situation, you must check the alert.log file for this information. 8. You attempt to add a datafile and get: Level: Intermediate ORA-01118: cannot add anymore datafiles: limit of 40 exceeded What is the problem and how can you fix it? Expected answer: When the database was created the db_files parameter in the initialization file was set to 40. You can shutdown and reset this to a higher value, up to the value of MAX_DATAFILES as specified at database creation. If the MAX_DATAFILES is set to low, you will have to rebuild the control file to increase it before proceeding. 9. You look at your fragmentation report and see that smon hasn?t coalesced any of you tablespaces, even though you know several have large chunks of contiguous free extents. What is the problem? Level: High Expected answer: Check the dba_tablespaces view for the value of pct_increase for the tablespaces. If pct_increase is zero, smon will not coalesce their free space. 10. Your users get the following error: Level: Intermediate ORA-00055 maximum number of DML locks exceeded What is the problem and how do you fix it? Expected answer: The number of DML Locks is set by the initialization parameter DML_LOCKS. If this value is set to low (which it is by default) you will get this error. Increase the value of DML_LOCKS. If you are sure that this is just a temporary problem, you can have them wait and then try again later and the error should clear. 11. You get a call from you backup DBA while you are on vacation. He has corrupted all of the control files while playing with the ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE command. What do you do? Level: High Expected answer: As long as all datafiles are safe and he was successful with the BACKUP controlfile command you can do the following: CONNECT INTERNAL STARTUP MOUNT (Take any readonly tablespaces offline before next step ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE .... OFFLINE;) RECOVER DATABASE USING BACKUP CONTROLFILE ALTER DATABASE OPEN RESETLOGS; (bring read-only tablespaces back online) Shutdown and backup the system, then restart If they have a recent output file from the ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROL FILE TO TRACE; command, they can use that to recover as well. If no backup of the control file is available then the following will be required: CONNECT INTERNAL STARTUP NOMOUNT CREATE CONTROL FILE .....; However, they will need to know all of the datafiles, logfiles, and settings for MAXLOGFILES, MAXLOGMEMBERS, MAXLOGHISTORY, MAXDATAFILES for the database to use the command.

This is the second part of the two part series on helping you answer those tough questions that you might experience in your quest for an Oracle DBA position. The Oracle Technical Interview can be quite daunting. You never quite know what to study for and how to prepare. I am fully aware of this, as I have received many emails since my original article on interview questions was released. While these questions are only guidelines as to what should and more than likely will be asked, I hope that you find some comfort in the review of them. As always, do not just memorize the answers, as there are jewels to be found in the quest of figuring out the answer from the question. As always, remember that as you go through the article, it is not enough to know the answer to a particular question; you must try to put yourself in an interview situation and experience answering the question for yourself. Therefore, after you have gone through the questions and answers read the question again and then answer it with your own words. As always, good luck, and cheers.

Technical - Oracle
Last time, we answered questions 1 thru 20 of the technical part of the interview. Here are the next 30 in this section. Depending on the mood of the interview and your ability to elaborate on the answer, try to give some insight that you know more than just the simple answer to some of these questions. Also, be sensitive to the interviewer getting tired of you talking too much. Well here they are. 21. How would you determine the time zone under which a database was operating?
select DBTIMEZONE from dual;

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Oracle Technical Interview Questions Answered - Part1 Oracle Technical Interview

22. Explain the use of setting GLOBAL_NAMES equal to TRUE. Setting GLOBAL_NAMES dictates how you might connect to a database. This variable is either TRUE or FALSE and if it is set to TRUE it enforces database links to have the same name as the remote database to which they are linking. 23. What command would you use to encrypt a PL/SQL application? WRAP 24. Explain the difference between a FUNCTION, PROCEDURE and PACKAGE. A function and procedure are the same in that they are intended to be a collection of PL/SQL code that carries a single task. While a procedure does not have to return any values to the calling application, a function will return a single value. A package on the other hand is a collection of functions and procedures that are grouped together based on their commonality to a business function or application.

25. Explain the use of table functions. Table functions are designed to return a set of rows through PL/SQL logic but are intended to be used as a normal table or view in a SQL statement. They are also used to pipeline information in an ETL process. 26. Name three advisory statistics you can collect. Buffer Cache Advice, Segment Level Statistics, & Timed Statistics 27. Where in the Oracle directory tree structure are audit traces placed? In unix $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/audit, in Windows the event viewer 28. Explain materialized views and how they are used. Materialized views are objects that are reduced sets of information that have been summarized, grouped, or aggregated from base tables. They are typically used in data warehouse or decision support systems. 29. When a user process fails, what background process cleans up after it? PMON 30. What background process refreshes materialized views? The Job Queue Processes. 31. How would you determine what sessions are connected and what resources they are waiting for? Use of V$SESSION and V$SESSION_WAIT 32. Describe what redo logs are. Redo logs are logical and physical structures that are designed to hold all the changes made to a database and are intended to aid in the recovery of a database. 33. How would you force a log switch?
ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE;

34. Give two methods you could use to determine what DDL changes have been made. You could use Logminer or Streams 35. What does coalescing a tablespace do?

Coalescing is only valid for dictionary-managed tablespaces and de-fragments space by combining neighboring free extents into large single extents. 36. What is the difference between a TEMPORARY tablespace and a PERMANENT tablespace? A temporary tablespace is used for temporary objects such as sort structures while permanent tablespaces are used to store those objects meant to be used as the true objects of the database. 37. Name a tablespace automatically created when you create a database. The SYSTEM tablespace. 38. When creating a user, what permissions must you grant to allow them to connect to the database? Grant the CONNECT to the user. 39. How do you add a data file to a tablespace?
ALTER TABLESPACE <tablespace_name> ADD DATAFILE <datafile_name> SIZE <size>

40. How do you resize a data file?

ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE <datafile_name> RESIZE <new_size>;

41. What view would you use to look at the size of a data file?
DBA_DATA_FILES

42. What view would you use to determine free space in a tablespace?
DBA_FREE_SPACE

43. How would you determine who has added a row to a table? Turn on fine grain auditing for the table. 44. How can you rebuild an index?

ALTER INDEX <index_name> REBUILD;

45. Explain what partitioning is and what its benefit is. Partitioning is a method of taking large tables and indexes and splitting them into smaller, more manageable pieces. 46. You have just compiled a PL/SQL package but got errors, how would you view the errors?
SHOW ERRORS

47. How can you gather statistics on a table? The ANALYZE command. 48. How can you enable a trace for a session? Use the DBMS_SESSION.SET_SQL_TRACE or Use ALTER SESSION SET SQL_TRACE = TRUE; 49. What is the difference between the SQL*Loader and IMPORT utilities? These two Oracle utilities are used for loading data into the database. The difference is that the import utility relies on the data being produced by another Oracle utility EXPORT while the SQL*Loader utility allows data to be loaded that has been produced by other utilities from different data sources just so long as it conforms to ASCII formatted or delimited files. 50. Name two files used for network connection to a database. TNSNAMES.ORA and SQLNET.ORA

Technical - UNIX
Every DBA should know something about the operating system that the database will be running on. The questions here are related to UNIX but you should equally be able to answer questions related to common Windows environments. 1. How do you list the files in an UNIX directory while also showing hidden files?
ls -ltra

2. How do you execute a UNIX command in the background? Use the "&" 3. What UNIX command will control the default file permissions when files are created? Umask 4. Explain the read, write, and execute permissions on a UNIX directory. Read allows you to see and list the directory contents. Write allows you to create, edit and delete files and subdirectories in the directory. Execute gives you the previous read/write permissions plus allows you to change into the directory and execute programs or shells from the directory. 5. the difference between a soft link and a hard link? A symbolic (soft) linked file and the targeted file can be located on the same or different file system while for a hard link they must be located on the same file system. 6. Give the command to display space usage on the UNIX file system.
df -lk

7. Explain iostat, vmstat and netstat. Iostat reports on terminal, disk and tape I/O activity. Vmstat reports on virtual memory statistics for processes, disk, tape and CPU activity. Netstat reports on the contents of network data structures. 8. How would you change all occurrences of a value using VI? Use :%s/<old>/<new>/g 9. Give two UNIX kernel parameters that effect an Oracle install SHMMAX & SHMMNI 10. Briefly, how do you install Oracle software on UNIX.

Basically, set up disks, kernel parameters, and run orainst. I hope that these interview questions were not too hard. Remember these are "core" DBA questions and not necessarily related to the Oracle options that you may encounter in some interviews. Take a close look at the requirements for any job and try to extract questions that interviewers may ask from manuals and real life experiences. For instance, if they are looking for a DBA to run their databases in RAC environments, you should try to determine what hardware and software they are using BEFORE you get to the interview. This would allow you to brush up on particular environments and not be caught off-guard. Good luck!

A bitmap index is a type of index that uses a string of bits to quickly locate rows in a table. Bitmap indexes are normally used to index low cardinality columns in a warehouse environment. [edit]

History Examples

Bitmap indexes was introduced in Oracle version 7.3.4. [edit]

Bitmap Index:
CREATE BITMAP INDEX emp_bitmap_idx ON big_emp(sex);

Bitmap Join Index:

CREATE BITMAP INDEX emp_dept_loc ON emp(dept.loc) FROM emp, dept WHERE emp.deptno = dept.deptno TABLESPACE index_ts1;