Just the other day I was busy during a performance tuning exercise I explained to the team of DBA that how much log file is critical and important for their performance. Once I was explaining the importance and role of the LDF file in the performance, one of the DBA from the team asked me question about what would they do if they somehow lose the LDF file or just have corrupted log file which they do not care now. Well, I though it was a very important question and I believe it can be a very good interview question as well. Let us learn about how to attach the MDF data file without LDF log file.
Moving TempDB to New Drive – Interview Question of the Week #077
Midnight at 1 AM, I received a call from my customer where I have earlier worked on performance tuning project. As soon as I picked up the phone call the first statement from my friend was about TempDB and it was as follows:
“We should have followed your advice, the TempDB is full, now help us fix it.”
What is a Master Database in SQL Server? – Interview Question of the Week #076
The other day, I received an email from a user, who had dropped master database in their system. I told him directly that he should have not dropped master database as that is a very important system database. It is really strange that after so many years quite a few of the people do not know what is a master database in SQL Server.
Can We Have NULL Value in Primary Key? – Interview Question of the Week #075
This is a very interesting question. I really do not know why interviews are fascinated with this question. One of the professional services I offer is to help organizations select an ideal employee for their organization and last week, I was on a conference call with a large MNC who was looking for performance tuning expert for their organization. We interviewed around 50 different employees and offered jobs to 2 experts and 1 has so far accepted it. One of the questions which I see my friends from the interview panel asking again and again was about Primary Key. I noticed that most of the candidate got it correct.
SQL SERVER – How Much Free Space I Have in My Database?
This is one of the simplest query that I wrote for one of my consulting customers who asked me. When I was discussing with the customer on some of the best practices of working with SQL Server, I was telling him not to use the autogrowth as a regular feature to use. I wanted the DBA to make sure that the autogrowth never gets called. The immediate question was – how do I know I need to increase my database files? When should I be doing them? In What maintenance cycle should this be done to find Free Space.
Sort Query Using Dynamic Variables Without EXEC – Interview Question of the Week #074
It does not matter which version of SQL Server we are using, I think this question is going to be there universally all the time when people want to sort query using dynamic variables. Trust me, this is indeed a popular question. After 14 years of experience in the industry, just last week, I was asked this question when one of my clients was evaluating me to tune their queries. Well, for a moment I thought the client should know that I know these kind of questions. Next moment, I realize that this is my opportunity to impress them as they do know the answer.
What is NOT NULL Constraint? – Interview Question of the Week #073
I am an independent database consultant and I focus on SQL Server Performance Tuning. The other day when I was working with my customer on a large project on performance tuning, we noticed a table which had created performance issues and it contains a huge amount of NULL data. In this blog post we will learn about NOT NULL constraint.