What’s MySQL ?
MySQL (pronounced “my ess cue el”) is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. Because it is open source, anyone can download MySQL and tailor it to their needs in accordance with the general public license. MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility. …
What is DDL, DML and DCL ?
If you look at the large variety of SQL commands, they can be divided into three large subgroups. Data Definition Language deals with database schemas and descriptions of how the data should reside in the database, therefore language statements like CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE belong to DDL. DML deals with data manipulation, and therefore includes most common SQL statements such SELECT, INSERT, etc. Data Control Language includes commands such as GRANT, and mostly concerns with rights, permissions and other controls of the database system.
How do you get the number of rows affected by query?
SELECT COUNT (user_id) FROM users would only return the number of user_id?s.
If the value in the column is repeatable, how do you find out the unique values?
Use DISTINCT in the query, such as SELECT DISTINCT user_firstname FROM users; You can also ask for a number of distinct values by saying SELECT COUNT (DISTINCT user_firstname) FROM users;
How do you return the a hundred books starting from 25th?
SELECT book_title FROM books LIMIT 25, 100. The first number in LIMIT is the offset, the second is the number.
You wrote a search engine that should retrieve 10 results at a time, but at the same time you?d like to know how many rows there?re total. How do you display that to the user?
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS page_title FROM web_pages LIMIT 1,10; SELECT FOUND_ROWS(); The second query (not that COUNT() is never used) will tell you how many results there?re total, so you can display a phrase “Found 13,450,600 results, displaying 1-10″. Note that FOUND_ROWS does not pay attention to the LIMITs you specified and always returns the total number of rows affected by query.
How would you write a query to select all teams that won either 2, 4, 6 or 8 games?
SELECT team_name FROM teams WHERE team_won IN (2, 4, 6, 8 )
How would you select all the users, whose phone number is null?
SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE ISNULL(user_phonenumber);
What does this query mean: SELECT user_name, user_isp FROM users LEFT JOIN isps USING (user_id) ?
It?s equivalent to saying SELECT user_name, user_isp FROM users LEFT JOIN isps WHERE users.user_id=isps.user_id
What does ?i-am-a-dummy flag to do when starting MySQL?
Makes the MySQL engine refuse UPDATE and DELETE commands where the WHERE clause is not present.
On executing the DELETE statement I keep getting the error about foreign key constraint failing. What do I do?
What it means is that so of the data that you?re trying to delete is still alive in another table. Like if you have a table for universities and a table for students, which contains the ID of the university they go to, running a delete on a university table will fail if the students table still contains people enrolled at that university. Proper way to do it would be to delete the offending data first, and then delete the university in question. Quick way would involve running SET foreign_key_checks=0 before the DELETE command, and setting the parameter back to 1 after the DELETE is done. If your foreign key was formulated with ON DELETE CASCADE, the data in dependent tables will be removed automatically.
When would you use ORDER BY in DELETE statement?
When you?re not deleting by row ID. Such as in DELETE FROM techinterviews_com_questions ORDER BY timestamp LIMIT 1. This will delete the most recently posted question in the table techinterviews_com_questions.
How can you see all indexes defined for a table?
SHOW INDEX FROM techinterviews_questions;
How would you change a column from VARCHAR(10) to VARCHAR(50)?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_questions CHANGE techinterviews_content techinterviews_CONTENT VARCHAR(50).
How would you delete a column?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_answers DROP answer_user_id.
How would you change a table to InnoDB?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_questions ENGINE innodb;
When you create a table, and then run SHOW CREATE TABLE on it, you occasionally get different results than what you typed in. What does MySQL modify in your newly created tables?
1. VARCHARs with length less than 4 become CHARs
2. CHARs with length more than 3 become VARCHARs.
3. NOT NULL gets added to the columns declared as PRIMARY KEYs
4. Default values such as NULL are specified for each column
How do I find out all databases starting with ?tech? to which I have access to?
SHOW DATABASES LIKE ?tech%?;
How do you concatenate strings in MySQL?
CONCAT (string1, string2, string3)
How do you get a portion of a string?
SELECT SUBSTR(title, 1, 10) from techinterviews_questions;
What?s the difference between CHAR_LENGTH and LENGTH?
The first is, naturally, the character count. The second is byte count. For the Latin characters the numbers are the same, but they?re not the same for Unicode and other encodings.
What do % and _ mean inside LIKE statement?
% corresponds to 0 or more characters, _ is exactly one character.
What does + mean in REGEXP?
At least one character. Appendix G. Regular Expressions from MySQL manual is worth perusing before the interview.
How do you get the month from a timestamp?
SELECT MONTH(techinterviews_timestamp) from techinterviews_questions;
How do you offload the time/date handling to MySQL?
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(techinterviews_timestamp, ?%Y-%m-%d?) from techinterviews_questions; A similar TIME_FORMAT function deals with time.
How do you add three minutes to a date?
ADDDATE(techinterviews_publication_date, INTERVAL 3 MINUTE)
What?s the difference between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
Internally Unix timestamps are stored as 32-bit integers, while MySQL timestamps are stored in a similar manner, but represented in readable YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format.
How do you convert between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
UNIX_TIMESTAMP converts from MySQL timestamp to Unix timestamp, FROM_UNIXTIME converts from Unix timestamp to MySQL timestamp.
What are ENUMs used for in MySQL?
You can limit the possible values that go into the table. CREATE TABLE months (month ENUM ?January?, ?February?, ?March?,?); INSERT months VALUES (?April?);
How are ENUMs and SETs represented internally?
As unique integers representing the powers of two, due to storage optimizations.
How do you start and stop MySQL on Windows?
net start MySQL, net stop MySQL
Explain the difference between mysql and mysql interfaces in PHP?
mysqli is the object-oriented version of mysql library functions.
What’s the default port for MySQL Server?
3306
What does tee command do in MySQL?
tee followed by a filename turns on MySQL logging to a specified file. It can be stopped by command note.
Can you save your connection settings to a conf file?
Yes, and name it ~/.my.conf. You might want to change the permissions on the file to 600, so that it’s not readable by others.
How do you change a password for an existing user via mysqladmin?
mysqladmin -u root -p password “newpassword”
Use mysqldump to create a copy of the database?
mysqldump -h mysqlhost -u username -p mydatabasename > dbdump.sql
Have you ever used MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser?
Describe the tasks you accomplished with these tools.
What are some good ideas regarding user security in MySQL?
There is no user without a password. There is no user without a user name. There is no user whose Host column contains % (which here indicates that the user can log in from anywhere in the network or the Internet). There are as few users as possible (in the ideal case only root) who have unrestricted access.
What are HEAP tables in MySQL?
HEAP tables are in-memory. They are usually used for high-speed temporary storage. No TEXT or BLOB fields are allowed within HEAP tables. You can only use the comparison operators = and <=>. HEAP tables do not support AUTO_INCREMENT. Indexes must be NOT NULL.
How do you control the max size of a HEAP table?
MySQL config variable max_heap_table_size.
What are CSV tables?
Those are the special tables, data for which is saved into comma-separated values files. They cannot be indexed.
Explain federated tables. ?
Introduced in MySQL 5.0, federated tables allow access to the tables located on other databases on other servers.
What is SERIAL data type in MySQL?
BIGINT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT
What happens when the column is set to AUTO INCREMENT and you reach the maximum value for that table?
It stops incrementing. It does not overflow to 0 to prevent data losses, but further inserts are going to produce an error, since the key has been used already.
Explain the difference between BOOL, TINYINT and BIT. ?
Prior to MySQL 5.0.3: those are all synonyms. After MySQL 5.0.3: BIT data type can store 8 bytes of data and should be used for binary data.
Explain the difference between FLOAT, DOUBLE and REAL. ?
FLOATs store floating point numbers with 8 place accuracy and take up 4 bytes. DOUBLEs store floating point numbers with 16 place accuracy and take up 8 bytes. REAL is a synonym of FLOAT for now.
MySQL is a relational database management system.
A relational database stores data in separate tables rather than putting all the data in one big storeroom. This adds speed and flexibility. The tables are linked by defined relations making it possible to combine data from several tables on request. The SQL part of MySQL stands for “Structured Query Language” – the most common standardized language used to access databases.
MySQL is Open Source Software.
Open source means that it is possible for anyone to use and modify. Anybody can download MySQL from the Internet and use it without paying anything. Anybody so inclined can study the source code and change it to fit their needs. MySQL uses the GPL (GNU General Public License) http://www.gnu.org, to define what you may and may not do with the software in different situations. If you feel uncomfortable with the GPL or need to embed MySQL into a commercial application you can buy a commercially licensed version from us.
Why use MySQL?
MySQL is very fast, reliable, and easy to use. If that is what you are looking for, you should give it a try. MySQL also has a very practical set of features developed in very close cooperation with our users. You can find a performance comparison of MySQL to some other database managers on our benchmark page. See section 12.7 Using Your Own Benchmarks. MySQL was originally developed to handle very large databases much faster than existing solutions and has been successfully used in highly demanding production environments for several years. Though under constant development, MySQL today offers a rich and very useful set of functions. The connectivity, speed, and security make MySQL highly suited for accessing databases on the Internet.
The technical features of MySQL
For advanced technical information, see section 7 MySQL Language Reference. MySQL is a client/server system that consists of a multi-threaded SQL server that supports different backends, several different client programs and libraries, administrative tools, and a programming interface. We also provide MySQL as a multi-threaded library which you can link into your application to get a smaller, faster, easier to manage product. MySQL has a lot of contributed software available.
MySQL (pronounced “my ess cue el”) is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. Because it is open source, anyone can download MySQL and tailor it to their needs in accordance with the general public license. MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility. …
What is DDL, DML and DCL ?
If you look at the large variety of SQL commands, they can be divided into three large subgroups. Data Definition Language deals with database schemas and descriptions of how the data should reside in the database, therefore language statements like CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE belong to DDL. DML deals with data manipulation, and therefore includes most common SQL statements such SELECT, INSERT, etc. Data Control Language includes commands such as GRANT, and mostly concerns with rights, permissions and other controls of the database system.
How do you get the number of rows affected by query?
SELECT COUNT (user_id) FROM users would only return the number of user_id?s.
If the value in the column is repeatable, how do you find out the unique values?
Use DISTINCT in the query, such as SELECT DISTINCT user_firstname FROM users; You can also ask for a number of distinct values by saying SELECT COUNT (DISTINCT user_firstname) FROM users;
How do you return the a hundred books starting from 25th?
SELECT book_title FROM books LIMIT 25, 100. The first number in LIMIT is the offset, the second is the number.
You wrote a search engine that should retrieve 10 results at a time, but at the same time you?d like to know how many rows there?re total. How do you display that to the user?
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS page_title FROM web_pages LIMIT 1,10; SELECT FOUND_ROWS(); The second query (not that COUNT() is never used) will tell you how many results there?re total, so you can display a phrase “Found 13,450,600 results, displaying 1-10″. Note that FOUND_ROWS does not pay attention to the LIMITs you specified and always returns the total number of rows affected by query.
How would you write a query to select all teams that won either 2, 4, 6 or 8 games?
SELECT team_name FROM teams WHERE team_won IN (2, 4, 6, 8 )
How would you select all the users, whose phone number is null?
SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE ISNULL(user_phonenumber);
What does this query mean: SELECT user_name, user_isp FROM users LEFT JOIN isps USING (user_id) ?
It?s equivalent to saying SELECT user_name, user_isp FROM users LEFT JOIN isps WHERE users.user_id=isps.user_id
What does ?i-am-a-dummy flag to do when starting MySQL?
Makes the MySQL engine refuse UPDATE and DELETE commands where the WHERE clause is not present.
On executing the DELETE statement I keep getting the error about foreign key constraint failing. What do I do?
What it means is that so of the data that you?re trying to delete is still alive in another table. Like if you have a table for universities and a table for students, which contains the ID of the university they go to, running a delete on a university table will fail if the students table still contains people enrolled at that university. Proper way to do it would be to delete the offending data first, and then delete the university in question. Quick way would involve running SET foreign_key_checks=0 before the DELETE command, and setting the parameter back to 1 after the DELETE is done. If your foreign key was formulated with ON DELETE CASCADE, the data in dependent tables will be removed automatically.
When would you use ORDER BY in DELETE statement?
When you?re not deleting by row ID. Such as in DELETE FROM techinterviews_com_questions ORDER BY timestamp LIMIT 1. This will delete the most recently posted question in the table techinterviews_com_questions.
How can you see all indexes defined for a table?
SHOW INDEX FROM techinterviews_questions;
How would you change a column from VARCHAR(10) to VARCHAR(50)?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_questions CHANGE techinterviews_content techinterviews_CONTENT VARCHAR(50).
How would you delete a column?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_answers DROP answer_user_id.
How would you change a table to InnoDB?
ALTER TABLE techinterviews_questions ENGINE innodb;
When you create a table, and then run SHOW CREATE TABLE on it, you occasionally get different results than what you typed in. What does MySQL modify in your newly created tables?
1. VARCHARs with length less than 4 become CHARs
2. CHARs with length more than 3 become VARCHARs.
3. NOT NULL gets added to the columns declared as PRIMARY KEYs
4. Default values such as NULL are specified for each column
How do I find out all databases starting with ?tech? to which I have access to?
SHOW DATABASES LIKE ?tech%?;
How do you concatenate strings in MySQL?
CONCAT (string1, string2, string3)
How do you get a portion of a string?
SELECT SUBSTR(title, 1, 10) from techinterviews_questions;
What?s the difference between CHAR_LENGTH and LENGTH?
The first is, naturally, the character count. The second is byte count. For the Latin characters the numbers are the same, but they?re not the same for Unicode and other encodings.
What do % and _ mean inside LIKE statement?
% corresponds to 0 or more characters, _ is exactly one character.
What does + mean in REGEXP?
At least one character. Appendix G. Regular Expressions from MySQL manual is worth perusing before the interview.
How do you get the month from a timestamp?
SELECT MONTH(techinterviews_timestamp) from techinterviews_questions;
How do you offload the time/date handling to MySQL?
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(techinterviews_timestamp, ?%Y-%m-%d?) from techinterviews_questions; A similar TIME_FORMAT function deals with time.
How do you add three minutes to a date?
ADDDATE(techinterviews_publication_date, INTERVAL 3 MINUTE)
What?s the difference between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
Internally Unix timestamps are stored as 32-bit integers, while MySQL timestamps are stored in a similar manner, but represented in readable YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format.
How do you convert between Unix timestamps and MySQL timestamps?
UNIX_TIMESTAMP converts from MySQL timestamp to Unix timestamp, FROM_UNIXTIME converts from Unix timestamp to MySQL timestamp.
What are ENUMs used for in MySQL?
You can limit the possible values that go into the table. CREATE TABLE months (month ENUM ?January?, ?February?, ?March?,?); INSERT months VALUES (?April?);
How are ENUMs and SETs represented internally?
As unique integers representing the powers of two, due to storage optimizations.
How do you start and stop MySQL on Windows?
net start MySQL, net stop MySQL
Explain the difference between mysql and mysql interfaces in PHP?
mysqli is the object-oriented version of mysql library functions.
What’s the default port for MySQL Server?
3306
What does tee command do in MySQL?
tee followed by a filename turns on MySQL logging to a specified file. It can be stopped by command note.
Can you save your connection settings to a conf file?
Yes, and name it ~/.my.conf. You might want to change the permissions on the file to 600, so that it’s not readable by others.
How do you change a password for an existing user via mysqladmin?
mysqladmin -u root -p password “newpassword”
Use mysqldump to create a copy of the database?
mysqldump -h mysqlhost -u username -p mydatabasename > dbdump.sql
Have you ever used MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser?
Describe the tasks you accomplished with these tools.
What are some good ideas regarding user security in MySQL?
There is no user without a password. There is no user without a user name. There is no user whose Host column contains % (which here indicates that the user can log in from anywhere in the network or the Internet). There are as few users as possible (in the ideal case only root) who have unrestricted access.
What are HEAP tables in MySQL?
HEAP tables are in-memory. They are usually used for high-speed temporary storage. No TEXT or BLOB fields are allowed within HEAP tables. You can only use the comparison operators = and <=>. HEAP tables do not support AUTO_INCREMENT. Indexes must be NOT NULL.
How do you control the max size of a HEAP table?
MySQL config variable max_heap_table_size.
What are CSV tables?
Those are the special tables, data for which is saved into comma-separated values files. They cannot be indexed.
Explain federated tables. ?
Introduced in MySQL 5.0, federated tables allow access to the tables located on other databases on other servers.
What is SERIAL data type in MySQL?
BIGINT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT
What happens when the column is set to AUTO INCREMENT and you reach the maximum value for that table?
It stops incrementing. It does not overflow to 0 to prevent data losses, but further inserts are going to produce an error, since the key has been used already.
Explain the difference between BOOL, TINYINT and BIT. ?
Prior to MySQL 5.0.3: those are all synonyms. After MySQL 5.0.3: BIT data type can store 8 bytes of data and should be used for binary data.
Explain the difference between FLOAT, DOUBLE and REAL. ?
FLOATs store floating point numbers with 8 place accuracy and take up 4 bytes. DOUBLEs store floating point numbers with 16 place accuracy and take up 8 bytes. REAL is a synonym of FLOAT for now.
MySQL is a relational database management system.
A relational database stores data in separate tables rather than putting all the data in one big storeroom. This adds speed and flexibility. The tables are linked by defined relations making it possible to combine data from several tables on request. The SQL part of MySQL stands for “Structured Query Language” – the most common standardized language used to access databases.
MySQL is Open Source Software.
Open source means that it is possible for anyone to use and modify. Anybody can download MySQL from the Internet and use it without paying anything. Anybody so inclined can study the source code and change it to fit their needs. MySQL uses the GPL (GNU General Public License) http://www.gnu.org, to define what you may and may not do with the software in different situations. If you feel uncomfortable with the GPL or need to embed MySQL into a commercial application you can buy a commercially licensed version from us.
Why use MySQL?
MySQL is very fast, reliable, and easy to use. If that is what you are looking for, you should give it a try. MySQL also has a very practical set of features developed in very close cooperation with our users. You can find a performance comparison of MySQL to some other database managers on our benchmark page. See section 12.7 Using Your Own Benchmarks. MySQL was originally developed to handle very large databases much faster than existing solutions and has been successfully used in highly demanding production environments for several years. Though under constant development, MySQL today offers a rich and very useful set of functions. The connectivity, speed, and security make MySQL highly suited for accessing databases on the Internet.
The technical features of MySQL
For advanced technical information, see section 7 MySQL Language Reference. MySQL is a client/server system that consists of a multi-threaded SQL server that supports different backends, several different client programs and libraries, administrative tools, and a programming interface. We also provide MySQL as a multi-threaded library which you can link into your application to get a smaller, faster, easier to manage product. MySQL has a lot of contributed software available.
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