What is Power BI?

Before going to move into the actual subject, let us have a quick look at

What is Business Intelligence?

The term business intelligence refers to the technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, and presentation of the business information. This BI technology provides the historical, current, and predictive views of the business operations. Today many tools work on business intelligence. Power BI is one of them, let us have quick of this microsoft BI tool

What is a Power BI?

It is a Microsoft business intelligence platform. This BI tool provides non-technical users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing the data. Its interface simple to use for the users who were familiar with Excel. Moreover, Microsoft has developed the product very versatile which requires a little training. Today these tools are available for the users under the license. Besides Microsoft team has also made this product available for the user from small to mid-size business owners free of cost.

Moreover, users can also get this tool as an application platform for windows 10 called power bi desktop and also native mobile apps for Windows, Android as well as IOS. Besides, there is also a Power BI Server for the companies that must maintain their data and reports on-premises. For that, this BI platform requires a special version of the application called Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server

Additionally, this platform gives you a productive platform and creative reports as well as the analytics. This microsoft BI suite provides multiple software connectors and services like Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service based on SaaS, and Power BI mobile apps for different mobile platforms. Among this Power BI, the desktop app is responsible to create reports, and Power BI Services are meant for publishing the reports, and finally, Power BI mobile app is used to view the reports as well as dashboards. Moreover, the desktop version of this platform is available on both 32-bit as well as the 64-bit operating system. Hence the users can get the latest version of this application at

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

These sets of services are used by business users to consume and build UI reports.

Why should you use this tool?

People prefer to utilize this powerful business intelligence tool due to the following reasons:

To utilize pre-built dashboards and reports for the SaaS Solutions
To get the updates of a real-time dashboard
Due to high security as well as a reliable connection to your data sources.
To work with the Quick deployment, hybrid configuration, and the secure environment
To explore the data using Natural Query language

Power BI Architecture:

Power BI is an architecture built on the top of Azure. Since there are multiple data sources that this tool is capable of connecting, this platform allows you to create reports and data visualizations on the data set. This platform gateway is connected to on-premise data sources to get continuous data for analytics and reporting. Moreover, Power BI Services are referred to as cloud services that are used to publish Power BI Reports and data visualizations. Besides using the power Bi app, users can connect to their data from anywhere.

Do wanna more on this business intelligence platform?, then visit Power BI Online Training

What are the components of Power BI?

This microsoft BI tool has several components. Let us discuss some of them:

Power Query :

Power Query is a data transformation and mash up engine. This enables you to discover, connect, combine, and refine the data sources to meet the required analysis. Moreover, we can download this as an add-on for excel and can be used as a part of Power BI Desktop

Power Pivot:

Power Pivot is a data modeling technique that lets you create data models, establish relationships, and create calculations. It uses the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language to model simple and complex data.

Power View:

Power View is a technology that is available in various places in regular use. Some of them were Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Power BI. Besides, this powerful interactive platform lets you create interactive charts, graphs, maps as well as the other visual that brings data to life.

Power Map :

Power Map for Excel is a 3-D Visualization tool that lets you map your data and plot more than millions of rows of data visually on Bing maps in 3-D format. This platform gets the data from various sources like Excel table (or) the data model in an Excel table. This component suits best with bing maps to get the best visualization based on longitude, latitude, and the street address information

Power BI Desktop:

It is a development tool for Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. Since this platform Desktop version is capable of providing everything under the same solution, it is easier to develop BI and data analysis experience.

Power Q& A:

This platform lets you explore your data in your own words. It is the fastest way to get the answer to your data using natural language.

This powerful business intelligence tool is capable of converting the data from different sources to interactive dashboards as well as the BI reports.

Power BI Key features:

Power BI has many key features since its inception. Some of them include:

Artificial intelligence:

Using AI, users can access image recognition and text analytics in Power BI. Moreover, they can create machine learning models using automated machine learning capabilities and integrate with Azure machine learning

Hybrid Deployment support:

This feature provides inbuilt connectors that allow the microsoft BI platform to connect with various data sources like Salesforce, Microsoft.

Quick Insights:

This business intelligence is capable of creating the user data subsets and automatically apply analytics to that information

Common data model Support:

This microsoft BI tool Support for common data allows the users to verbally query data using natural language and access the results

Customization:

This feature in Microsoft business intelligence platform allows you to change the default visualization and reporting tools. Moreover, this tool is also capable of importing the new tools into the platform

APIs for integration:

This feature provides the developers with a sample code and application performance Interfaces (APIs) for embedding the microsoft BI dashboard into other software products.

Hence likewise, there are many excellent features of this business intelligence platform. You people can get practical knowledge on this platform through Power BI Online Course. By reaching the end of the article, I hope you people have got an enough ideas regarding Power BI and its features. In the upcoming articles of this blog, I'll be sharing with you the details of installation, data connection.

What is App V ?

The requirement of a project varies from one to the other. So buying and installing the software for every project is a bit expensive. And the companies may not be in a position to afford all those. So to overcome all those problems, the operation team virtualizes the applications according to the project requirements. In this article, I'm going to explain to you what is app v? What is its use in the IT Industry. Let us start our discussion with What is App V? Microsoft application virtualization is also known as App-V is an application virtualization and application streaming solution. This application virtualization enables the administrator to deploy, update, and support applications in real-time. With App V, we can transform the locally installed products into centrally managed services. Here the applications were available where it does not require pre-configuration (or) the changes to the operating system. It makes the applications available to the end-user computer without having to install the applications directly on those computers. App V makes the application possible through a process called sequencing the application. This enables each application to run in its self-contained virtual environment on the client computer. Through this, we can eliminate the application conflicts but the applications can still interact with the client computer. Here, the App-V client is a feature that lets you interact with the application after it has been published to the computer. Here the client manages the virtual environment in which the virtualized application runs on each computer. Once the client has installed it on a computer, the applications must be available to the computer through a process called publishing that enables the end-user to run virtual applications. Through publishing, we can copy the virtual application icons and shortcuts to the computer. Moreover, this application package content is available to the end-users computer. The virtual application package content can be copied onto one (or) more application virtualization servers where it can stream down to the client on-demand and cached locally. Here the file servers and web servers can also be used as streaming servers and the content can be copied directly to the user computer. Depending on the size of the organization, you need to have many virtual applications available to the end-users across the world. Get more information on App V from live experts at App V Online Training What is a virtualized application? Whenever an application is virtualized, the essence of an application is previously captured and is dynamically instantiated on the target machine, whenever it is necessary. These virtual applications are the same applications that you will be installing on the operating system today where it does not require installation as well as configuration. We can describe the app virtualization as a deep set of files and registry redirections. Besides, we can view the app virtualization as a layering technology. Through App V, we can separate the application from OS instances that frees you to deliver any application to any desktop without any conflicts. What can be virtualized? Most of the enterprise desktop applications can be virtualized with App V. But there are some restrictions as well the situation that might work in a bad way. And we cannot deploy 100% of the application through App V and opt for another method if we cannot virtualize it in a single method. For an instance, you can use sccm to deploy MSi’s for native install (or) makes use of FSLogix (or) layering the product. When compared to other techniques in the market, App V supports a high percentage of your applications. How does it work? This starts working through packaging applications. This involves installing the applications and configuring them with a special capture tool called App –V Sequencer. Once we capture the application, we can use it on the multiple operating systems versions and simplifying your management application management needs. The goal of this sequencer is to capture the application and render it on a machine Os, and user format. App –V uses a unique streaming delivery with catching that allows for extremely fast delivery and offline capabilities. At the user operating system when the package is published, the app-v extensions are directly added to the operating systems, and placeholders for file and registry settings are added in a special set aside for virtual applications. The app-v client uses a combination of filter drivers and client services to enable the application virtualization magic to occur. What are the components of Application virtualization? This application virtualization has the following components. They are : Microsoft App-V Management Server: It provides a centralized location to manage the app –v infrastructure for delivering the virtual application to both app –v desktop client and remote desktop services. Here the app v uses a Microsoft SQL Server to store the data where one (or) more App V management servers can share a single SQL Server data store. Here the app v management server authenticates the request and provides the security, meeting, monitoring, and data gathering required by the administrator. Here the servers uses the active directory and the supporting tools to manage user and applications. The app-v management server has a silver light-based managed management site that enables administrators to configure app v infrastructure from any computer. Besides administrators can add and remove applications to manage shortcuts and assign access permissions to users and groups and create connection groups. App V publishing Server: It provides app v clients with entitles applications for a specific user and hosts the virtual package for streaming. The publishing server can be installed on the same machine (or) a separate machine. In live environments, the separate installation provides greater scalability of the infrastructure. App V Remote desktop client: It enables the remote desktop host servers to utilize the capabilities of app desktop clients for shared desktop sessions App V Virtualization Sequencer: It is a wizard-based tool that the administrators use to transform traditional applications into virtual applications. Here the sequence produces the application package that consists of several files. This includes a sequenced application (App V) file, Windows installer file (MSI) file that can be deployed for standalone operations. App V Management console: It is a administer tool to manage and set up, manage, and administer the app v servers. This is responsible to create, manage, and update the virtualized application packages. Likewise, there are some other minor components in App V. By reaching the end of this blog I hope you people have acquired enough knowledge on App V. In the upcoming post of this blog, I’ll sharing the details of creating the application using app v. You people can get practical knowledge on App V from beginner to the advanced level at App V Online Course

What is Office 365?

Microsoft is the largest and the oldest vendor started offering its products like Word, PowerPoint, excel from 1974. Today every computer user was very familiar with these Microsoft products. This is one of the most popular software suites in the world. These suites were being used by 1.5billion people worldwide. If you take the analysis of the past 3 decades, we cannot find a person who uses the computer without the office 365 suite. Millions of modern businesses rely on the Microsoft suite to communicate, create documents and balance the products. There are many hidden Microsoft products that many people were not aware of with the release of office 365. What is Microsoft office 365? Microsoft office 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and applications that integrates all the existing Microsoft applications into a cloud service as a main communication and collaboration applications. Office 365 is a subscription-based version of the Office 365 suite where you have a few options when purchasing the account. Office 365 personal gives you a single user full access to every office application. On the other hand, the office365 home is designed for families where multiple people will be using the office 365. But, office 365 has several advantages that aren’t available with the Microsoft office suite. For an instance, the subscription to Microsoft office includes excellent features like Translator, Resume assistant, and smart lookup. Here you can also collaborate with others in excels via co-authoring feature that lets you edit your workbook in real-time. Besides Office Mobile apps comes with more features when you subscribe. For instance, you can do things like inserting page breaks, use more colors (or) making pivot tables with excel. In the free version of the mobile apps, it allows you to perform basic tasks like creating a file, entering the text. The other advantage of using office 365 for business is the access to SharePoint online. This service includes some of the versions of office 365 that allow you to share and collaborates with others whether they are colleagues (or)customers. Here, this service allows you to set up permissions to any one of the organizations irrespective of the location. With the frequent subscription of office 365, the customer does get updates of the latest software, bug fixes updates. Are you looking to get practical knowledge on office 365? if so, visit Office365 Online Training How office 365 is different from Microsoft 365? Office 365 is different from Microsoft 365 in the following manner: a)Office 365 is a cloud-based suite of productivity, while Microsoft 365 is a package of services that includes all the tools along with other business tools. b)A user can subscribe to office 365 without subscribing to Microsoft 365. But all Microsoft users do have access to office 365. c)Microsoft 365 was developed to give business access to all the baseline tools they need to run their business infrastructure and secure their business What are the apps and services does office 365 for business include? Depending on the subscription you take in office 365 the apps and the services vary in your account. But core apps and services were included in office 365. Some of them are word, excel, PowerPoint, outlook, one-note, Exchange, Share Point, Skype for business, One Drive for business, and so on. Why Should companies use office 365? Due to the extreme feature of office 365, this suits best for both individuals as well as the corporate purposes. The reason why the companies use office 365 are as follows: a)To provide proactive protection against downtime. b)High system maintenance to ensure high-performance operations. c)To protect the system against security vulnerabilities. Benefits of office 365: The utilization of office 365 has the following benefits. They are: Explore and Integrate: Office 365 integrates easily with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft programs. It just takes few minutes to create a trial account, where the users can test and integrate with the cloud. Collaborate Anywhere and Anytime: With office 365, users can get web-enabled access to email, documents, calendars, whichever device (or) the browser they use. This accessibility enables unified collaboration among employees. Stay up and Running Always: By running your applications in the cloud and storing your data, you ensure all your business documents and applications such as email will always be available. Flexibility: With multiple options in the office 365 suite, enterprises buy only the office solutions they needed and convert the CAPEX to OPEX. Single Sign-on: Users can store their password in the system tray of the machine to avoid repeatedly signing in. Support: With Microsoft support, support users can receive a business class service through admin support, with a 99.9 % uptime guarantee, geo-redundant data centers, disaster recovery, robust security, privacy controls, and standards. Security Compliance: It has built-in security and continuous compliance. Through office 365 where the data is and who has the access to it. You can also wipe all your data remotely from your mobile device if it is lost (or) stolen. No licensing issues: Office 365 includes all the licensing and it can be deployed worldwide. It means everyone has the same version of Microsoft office and all receive the updates at the same time. Get Organized: When you use office 365, email, contacts, and calendar all are synchronized. The updated contact on your mobile will be automatically updated across the devices. Here you can also access the same data from any device (or) save the document on your PC and continue working on it through the smartphone (or) tablet. Real-time Collaboration: It allows the team to collaborate with various Microsoft products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Users can see the real-time edits, (or) additions to the document. It automatically saves each version to its early version easily. This ensures a quicker and simpler collaboration between the employees and departments that results in improved productivity. Likewise, you can enjoy more benefits, when you work with office 365. By reaching the end of this blog, I hope you people have gained good information on office 365. You people can acquire practical knowledge on these products taught by industry professionals at Office 365 Online Course. In the upcoming post of this blog, Ill be sharing the details of the utilization of various Microsoft products in details. You people can also check our Office 365 Interview Questions and get placed in a reputed company.

What is Power BI?

Since the data generation is happening exponentially, the necessity of business intelligence tools has become more and more in today's world. In the previous article of this blog, we people have discussed regarding Cognos, but there are some other bi tools like power bi in the market. So today in this article, let us have a look at power bi Before going to move into the actual subject, let us have a quick look at What is Business Intelligence? The term business intelligence refers to the technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, and presentation of the business information. This BI technology provides the historical, current, and predictive views of the business operations. Today many tools work on business intelligence. Power BI is one of them, let us have quick of this microsoft BI tool What is a Power BI? It is a Microsoft business intelligence platform. This BI tool provides non-technical users with tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing the data. Its interface simple to use for the users who were familiar with Excel. Moreover, Microsoft has developed the product very versatile which requires a little training. Today these tools are available for the users under the license. Besides Microsoft team has also made this product available for the user from small to mid-size business owners free of cost. Moreover, users can also get this tool as an application platform for windows 10 called power bi desktop and also native mobile apps for Windows, Android as well as IOS. Besides, there is also a Power BI Server for the companies that must maintain their data and reports on-premises. For that, this BI platform requires a special version of the application called Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server Additionally, this platform gives you a productive platform and creative reports as well as the analytics. This microsoft BI suite provides multiple software connectors and services like Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service based on SaaS, and Power BI mobile apps for different mobile platforms. Among this Power BI, the desktop app is responsible to create reports, and Power BI Services are meant for publishing the reports, and finally, Power BI mobile app is used to view the reports as well as dashboards. Moreover, the desktop version of this platform is available on both 32-bit as well as the 64-bit operating system. Hence the users can get the latest version of this application at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/ These sets of services are used by business users to consume and build UI reports. Why should you use this tool? People prefer to utilize this powerful business intelligence tool due to the following reasons: To utilize pre-built dashboards and reports for the SaaS Solutions To get the updates of a real-time dashboard Due to high security as well as a reliable connection to your data sources. To work with the Quick deployment, hybrid configuration, and the secure environment To explore the data using Natural Query language Power BI Architecture: Power BI is an architecture built on the top of Azure. Since there are multiple data sources that this tool is capable of connecting, this platform allows you to create reports and data visualizations on the data set. This platform gateway is connected to on-premise data sources to get continuous data for analytics and reporting. Moreover, Power BI Services are referred to as cloud services that are used to publish Power BI Reports and data visualizations. Besides using the power Bi app, users can connect to their data from anywhere. Do wanna more on this business intelligence platform?, then visit Power BI Online Training What are the components of Power BI? This microsoft BI tool has several components. Let us discuss some of them: Power Query : Power Query is a data transformation and mash up engine. This enables you to discover, connect, combine, and refine the data sources to meet the required analysis. Moreover, we can download this as an add-on for excel and can be used as a part of Power BI Desktop Power Pivot: Power Pivot is a data modeling technique that lets you create data models, establish relationships, and create calculations. It uses the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language to model simple and complex data. Power View: Power View is a technology that is available in various places in regular use. Some of them were Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Power BI. Besides, this powerful interactive platform lets you create interactive charts, graphs, maps as well as the other visual that brings data to life. Power Map : Power Map for Excel is a 3-D Visualization tool that lets you map your data and plot more than millions of rows of data visually on Bing maps in 3-D format. This platform gets the data from various sources like Excel table (or) the data model in an Excel table. This component suits best with bing maps to get the best visualization based on longitude, latitude, and the street address information Power BI Desktop: It is a development tool for Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. Since this platform Desktop version is capable of providing everything under the same solution, it is easier to develop BI and data analysis experience. Power Q& A: This platform lets you explore your data in your own words. It is the fastest way to get the answer to your data using natural language. This powerful business intelligence tool is capable of converting the data from different sources to interactive dashboards as well as the BI reports. Power BI Key features: Power BI has many key features since its inception. Some of them include: Artificial intelligence: Using AI, users can access image recognition and text analytics in Power BI. Moreover, they can create machine learning models using automated machine learning capabilities and integrate with Azure machine learning Hybrid Deployment support: This feature provides inbuilt connectors that allow the microsoft BI platform to connect with various data sources like Salesforce, Microsoft. Quick Insights: This business intelligence is capable of creating the user data subsets and automatically apply analytics to that information Common data model Support: This microsoft BI tool Support for common data allows the users to verbally query data using natural language and access the results Customization: This feature in Microsoft business intelligence platform allows you to change the default visualization and reporting tools. Moreover, this tool is also capable of importing the new tools into the platform APIs for integration: This feature provides the developers with a sample code and application performance Interfaces (APIs) for embedding the microsoft BI dashboard into other software products. Hence likewise, there are many excellent features of this business intelligence platform. You people can get practical knowledge on this platform through Power BI Online Course. By reaching the end of the article, I hope you people have got an enough ideas regarding Power BI and its features. In the upcoming articles of this blog, I'll be sharing with you the details of installation, data connection.

SharePoint Interview Questions

Q.What is SharePoint? Answer: SharePoint was born out of a simple idea: “Sharing Documents”. Microsoft developed family of software products called “SharePoint”, to perform features like File Sharing, Collaboration, and Web Publishing. In simple terms, SharePoint acts as the single platform to share, communicate, store, and collaborate the content, documents, and records Q.What is an app manifest? Answer: An app manifest is an XML file that declares the basic properties of the app along with where the app will run and what to do when the app is started. Q.Where can the code for an app run? Answer: SharePoint-hosted apps, Provider-hosted and auto hosted apps, Apps that have a mix of components in SharePoint and in the cloud Q.How does an app communicate with SharePoint? Answer: REST and JavaScript APIs Managed APIs (.NET) Q.How can the app authenticate to SharePoint? Answer: Inside SharePoint In the cloud Q.How are apps distributed? Answer: Apps for SharePoint are distributed as an app package. Q.What are some options for app publishing? Answer: Public SharePoint app store Organization’s app catalog Q.What is OData? Answer: The Open Data protocol (OData) lets you access a data source, such as a database, by browsing to a specially constructed URL. Q.What are Features of SharePoint? Answer: Communities: The new version of SharePoint allows users to work together in different ways. Microsoft has enhanced the social feature of SharePoint 2007 in SharePoint 2010 and has made it look better. Communities allow people to collaborate in groups, share knowledge, and find information on various topics easily. Content: SharePoint content shifts SharePoint 2010 from a departmental solution to an enterprise solution. There has been massive improvement in content wherein users can add a significant number of documents to SharePoint. They can even use external data storage options to store more data. Search: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has acquired FAST search server, which improves the search tremendously for users. Now, users not only can search for content, but also people. User can opt for better language options with thumbnails and previews. User can even sort out the search queries and study similar search to get relevant search results. Insights: With the help of SharePoint insights, users can access information through different data sources like dashboards, scorecards, reports and more. To help users, Microsoft has introduced performance point server to the SharePoint platform. It is also known as Performance point services for SharePoint. It helps users discover right people and expertise to make better business decisions. Compositions: SharePoint being a complete platform helps users in creating their code solution on premises or in the cloud. Complex application can be developed with the help of well-known tools like: InfoPath SharePoint designer 2013 Q.Explain a SharePoint site? Answer: A Web site hosted in a virtual URL. A SharePoint site is a place for collaboration, communication or content storage. Depending on your business needs, you can create sites such as team sites, blog sites, wiki sites and others. You can customize a site's appearance, users, user permissions, galleries, and site administration by using the Site Settings administration pages. Q.What is SharePoint site collection? Answer: A collection of SharePoint sites that share common administration pages and site settings. Site collections allow you to share content types, site columns, templates, and Web Parts within a group of SharePoint sites. Q.What is SharePoint Web Farm? Answer: A group of Office SharePoint servers, that share the same configuration database. All site content and all configuration data is shared for all front-end Web servers in a server farm. Q.What is a Feature? Answer: A package of Windows SharePoint Services elements that can be activated for a specific scope and that helps users accomplish a particular goal or task. SharePoint have this inherently portable and modular functionality, which simplifies modification of sites through site definitions. For more information Q.What is a Master page? Answer: Pages, that provide a consistent layout and appearance (look and feel) for SharePoint sites. They allow you to factor out layout, structure, and interface elements such as headers, footers, navigation bars, and content placeholders. Master pages in ASP.NET 2.0 and master pages in Windows SharePoint Services work in the same way. Q.What is a Content type? Answer: A reusable collection of settings to apply to a certain category of content such as documents and folders. Content types are designed to help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful way. Imagine a business situation in which you have three different types of documents: expense reports, purchase orders and invoices. All three types of documents have some characteristics in common for one thing; they are all financial documents and contain data with values in currency. Yet each type of document has its own data requirements, its own document template, and its own workflow. One solution to this business problem is to create four content types. The first content type, Financial Document, could encapsulate data requirements that are common to all financial documents in the organization. The remaining three, Expense Report, Purchase Order, and Invoice, could inherit common elements from Financial Document. In addition, they could define characteristics that are unique to each type, such as a particular set of metadata, a document template to be used in creating a new item, and a specific workflow for processing an item Q.What is a Solution? Answer: A file that is a bundling of all the components for extending Windows SharePoint Services in a particular way. A solution file has a .cab-based format with a .wsp extension. A solution is a deployable, reusable package that can contain a set of features, site definitions and assemblies that apply to sites, and that you can enable or disable individually. You can use the solution file to deploy the contents of a Web Part package, including assemblies, class resources, and other package components. Q.What is a Theme? Answer: A group of files (CSS, images) that allow you to define the appearance (look and feel) of Web pages. Themes in ASP.NET 2.0 and themes in SharePoint Products and Technologies work in the same way. Themes are used to help organizations to brand their portals and team sites. Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes a set of predefined themes. However, as a developer, you can create custom themes for your company. Q.What is the GAC? Answer: The GAC stands for the global assembly cache. It is the machine wide code cache which will give custom binaries place into the full trust code group for SharePoint. Certain SharePoint assets, such as Feature Receivers need full trust to run correctly, and therefore are put into the GAC. You should always try to avoid deployment to the GAC as much as possible since it will possibly allow development code to do more than it was intended to do. Q.What are safe controls, and what type of information, is placed in that element in a SharePoint web.config file? Ans: When you deploy a WebPart to SharePoint, you must first make it as a safe control to use within SharePoint in the web.config file. Entries made in the safe controls element of SharePoint are encountered by the SharePointHandler object and will be loaded in the SharePoint environment properly; those not will not be loaded and will throw an error. In the generic safe control entry (this is general, there could be more), there is generally the Assembly name, the namespace, the public key token numeric, the typename, and the safe declaration (whether it is safe or not). There are other optional elements. Q.How can you get a reference to a site? oSPSite = new SPSite("http:/server"); Answer: oSPWeb = oSPSite.OpenWeb(); Q.How do you connect (reference) to a SharePoint list, and how do you insert a new List Item? Answer: using(SPSite mySite = new SPSite("yourserver")) { using(SPWeb myWeb = mySite.OpenWeb()) { SPList interviewList = myWeb.Lists; SPListItem newItem = interviewList.Items.Add(); newItem = "interview"; newItem.Update(); } } Q.How would you loop using SPList through all SharePont List items, assuming you know the name (in a string value) of the list you want to iterate through, and already have all the site code written? Answer: SPList interviewList = myWeb.Lists; foreach (SPListItem interview in interviewList) { // Place your code here } Some general terms and their definitions Templates: Template acts as stencils, used to create similar attribute elements. Language: SharePoint has ability to create multilingual sites. Language packs are installed on the server to translate the portal in other languages. User can select a language-specific site template while creating new site. Security: User can define unique user groups and permissions for each site as well as site elements. Navigation: Site navigation reflects the relationships among the sites in a site collection. User can fine-tune site's navigation experience by configuring unique navigation links in each part of site's hierarchy. Therefore, planning navigation and planning sites structures are closely related activities. Web Pages: Web pages in sites or site collection are used to display information. Site Layouts: Site Layout dictates the overall look and feel of the SharePoint site. Themes: Themes specify the appearance of site in terms of Color & font. Regional Settings: Regional settings are specific to particular country or geography, such as locale, time zone, sort order, time format and calendar type. Search: User can make each site having unique search settings. For example, user can specify that a particular site never appear in search results. Content Types: A content type defines the attributes of a list item, a document, or a folder. Workflows: Workflow defines the action or series of actions that has to be performed on the occurrence of event When is an app granted the permissions it asked for? Answer: An app is installed by a website administrator, a app is explicitly granted permission by a tenant administrator or website administrator or an end user gives consent. Q,What are scopes in terms of SharePoint permissions? Answer: Scopes indicate where in the SharePoint hierarchy a permission request applies. Q.What are some of the features of Office 365 Development Tools? Answer: Create and manage projects, develop apps, share and publish apps. Q.What office technology can be used to build SharePoint 2013 workflows? Answer: Visio 2013 includes a SharePoint 2013 Workflow template that can be used. Q.What is a workflow stage shape in SharePoint Designer 2013? Answer: A stage can contain any number of shapes and may include branching. The stage or step itself might be one node of a longer workflow. Q.What is a workflow loop shape in SharePoint Designer 2013? Answer: Loops are a series of connected shapes that will execute as a loop, returning from the last shape in the series to the first, until a condition is satisfied. What is a step shape in SharePoint Designer 2013? Answer: Steps represent a grouped series of sequential actions. Q.What is an example approach to navigate SharePoint data structure in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Managed code or the SharePoint REST service. Q.What is the SPContextWebInformation structure? Answer: Contains the initialization properties that can be used in subsequent REST requests. Q.What is List? Answer: A SharePoint list is a collection of records related to an entity like a student, employees, etc. Records in lists are termed as items. A list contains columns or fields that define the item data or metadata. Lists are created using a GUI interface by defining the metadata types. Once the Lists are created, it becomes very easy to add, edit, delete, and search items in it. Q.What is Document Library? Answer: A Document library allows users to easily store, upload, share, collaborate, and track documents or files. Users can also store the properties related to documents called metadata to make the documents easily searchable. Q.What is Picture library? Answer: A Picture library allows users to easily store, upload, share, collaborate and track images or digital pictures. Users can also store the properties related to images called metadata to make the images easily searchable. Q.What is Check-out? Answer: Check-out ensures that only one person can edit a document at a time. To edit a document, a user would first have to check out a document. This prevents anyone else from editing the document until that user check the document back in. During the period that the document is checked out, other users can only view a read-only version of the document. Q.What is Check-in? Answer: Check in a file means that user is uploading the modified file to the library and it is now available for edit by other users. Once the document is checked in, the document becomes available again to be checked out by someone else. In addition, all changes made by the person who checked in the document are now visible to others. Q.What is Versioning? Versioning allows updates, restoring and tracking of the items in a list or in a library when they are changed. Versioning makes use of version numbers to keep track of changes. Q.What is Site Columns? Answer: A site column is a reusable column definition or template that user can assign to multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites. Site columns are useful if user organization wants to establish some consistent settings across lists and libraries. Q.What is rating? Answer: Rating provides user the ability to rate content (of any type, lists, documents, pages on a site and even content types) and stores that rating information in the database. It is an assessment or classification of content on a scale according to how well the content meets specific criteria. Ratings show an average score that can range from 1 to 100. Q.What is Audience targeting? Answer: The content inside lists, libraries, web parts, etc., can be targeted to appear only for the users who are members of a particular group or audience. The audience can be identified via SharePoint groups, distribution lists and security groups. Q.What are views? Answer: User can use views to see the items in a list or library that are most important to user or that best fit a purpose. For example, user can create views of the files that were created most recently, of the list items that apply to a specific department, or of the files created by one person. After creating a view, it is always available when user looks at a list or library. User can create personal views and public views. A personal view is available only to user while looking at a list or library. A public view is available when anyone looks at a list or library. To create a public view, user must have permission to change the design of the list or library. User can make a public view the default view for a list or library. Q.What are the various types of views? Answer: •Standard: This view displays list items or files like a traditional list on a Web page. Standard view is the default for most types of lists and libraries, and user can customize it in several different ways. Calendar: This view displays the calendar items in a visual format that is similar to a desk or wall calendar. User can apply daily, weekly, or monthly views in this format. For example, user can create a calendar to track the team's deadlines for a project or holidays for the organization. Datasheet: This view provides data in a format that user can edit, such as a table in a database or spreadsheet. This view can be helpful if user need to perform large editing tasks or customization, or export data to a spreadsheet or database program. Datasheet view requires a control or program that is compatible with Windows SharePoint Services, such as Office Access 2007 and ActiveX control support. Gantt: This view provides a visual view of data, with bars that track progress, if data is based on a time interval. A Gantt view can help user manage projects and see a quick overview of the data. User can use this view, for example, to see which tasks overlap each other and to visualize overall progress. Q.What is Task list? Answer: A task list in SharePoint displays a collection of tasks that has to be performed. Users can also add columns or metadata to store additional information about the tasks. Q.What is Document Set? Answer: Document Set enables users to group multiple documents that support a single project or task, together into a single entity. All documents in a Document Set share the metadata and the entire set can be versioned. Document sets are built on SharePoint 2010 content types, and user can create multiple unique document set content types as part of their implementation. Q.What is Drop-Off Library? Answer: The Drop off Library will be the default destination when a user tries to upload a document to this site. This is used when user does not know that where should the document be uploaded in the site. In that case, user uploads the document in this library and the document is routed automatically to the specific library. Q.What is Routing Rules List? Answer: The Routing Rules list, as its name implies, contains the rules for how a document is to be routed to its final destination. These rules are written to route the documents to their final and proper destination. Q.What is Blogs? Answer: Blogs is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, description of events, or other material such as graphics or video. It can be used to post ideas, observations, thoughts and expertise on which comments can be done. Q.What is Enterprise wiki? Answer: An enterprise wiki is a publishing site for sharing and updating large volumes of information across an enterprise. Enterprise wiki can be used as a central repository for large organizations to store and share unstated information. Q.What is Tagging? Answer: Tagging is the ability to tag documents that enables user to search document easily with keywords. Tags cloud web parts enable users to display tagging keywords. Q.What is a Recent Activity? Answer: The recent activity is a helpful way to understand what the person has been working on recently. Q.What is Survey? Answer: Survey is used when user want to collect the responses from various people, across the organization about any event, any activity or any other thing. It is a list that allows user to collect the responses in various ways. User can ask the questions and they can answer those questions and then result can be analyzed by taking it to the excel sheet or through graphical summary or by watching all responses at once. Q.What is MySite? Answer: My Site is the individual mini sites and acts as a central location to view and manage all of a user’s documents, tasks, etc. My Sites enables users to easily share information about themselves and their work. This sharing of information encourages collaboration, builds and promotes information about expertise and targets relevant content to the people who are interested. Q.What is enterprise Metadata Management? Answer: Enterprise metadata management (EMM) is a set of features introduced in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that enable taxonomists, librarians and administrators to create and manage terms and sets of terms across the enterprise. There are two key principles in the use of metadata: Use of tags: It is easy for a site to use enterprise wide tags and taxonomies, and easy for users to apply them. Application of tags in SharePoint 2010: The document libraries are configured to use metadata as a primary navigation pivot and improves search. Q.What is Web part? Answer: Web Parts are customizable plug and play components that empower information workers to create personalized user interfaces by simply dragging and dropping them on a Web page. Web parts allow customization at both design time and run time. There are two types of web parts. In-built web parts: Web parts that are included in SharePoint. Developers can drag them from web part galleries and drop them into web part zones. Custom web parts: Web parts that are created by the user using visual studio is called custom web parts. A Web Part is composed of the following entities: The Web Part description file (.dwp) is a portable container of default and personalized property values for the Web Part. The Web Part assembly file (.dll) contains the logic and code for the Web Part, and is installed on the server running Windows SharePoint Services. Resource files that support the Web Part these are also stored on the server. Tables in the Windows SharePoint Services database are used to store current values of the Web Part properties. Q.What is RSS Viewer? Answer: RSS viewer is a web part that provides a good way of adding interesting content to SharePoint site pages. Q.What is a Record Center? Answer: The Records Center is intended to serve as a central repository in which an organization can store and manage all of its records such as legal or financial documents. The Records Center supports the entire records management process, from records collection through records management to records disposition. The Records Center site template is a pre-configured site designed specifically to help organizations implement their records management and retention programs. Versioning, auditing, metadata management, eDiscovery, and customizable record routing are built-in features that can help user to manage records more effectively. Q.What is Document Center? Answer: Document Center is a site on which user can centrally manage documents in an enterprise. A large-scale library useful as an enterprise knowledge base or historical archive includes features to help users navigate, search, and manage many documents in a deep hierarchy by using a set of specialized Web Parts. .Q. What is Digital asset management? Answer: SharePoint server 2010 includes a new asset library specially designed for managing and sharing digital assets such as audio, video, and other rich media files known as Digital Asset Management. Q.What is Social networking? Answer: Social Networking Connects public to MySite pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests. Q.What is a recycle bin in SharePoint? Answer: Whenever user will delete something, it goes to recycle bin in SharePoint. User can restore items that have been deleted from the site from the recycle bin. Q.What is a Publishing feature? Answer: Publishing feature enables the delivery of content for both internal and external users. User need to turn on the Publishing feature on a site. Checked in and Checked Out feature in a Site gets enabled and if user don’t Checked-in the change version then older version of pages are shown to users .Users can then brand the site so that it has the corporate look and feel, and can enable other users to edit the corporate site within the context of the Web. On a site with the Publishing functionality turned on, user can also create a multilingual site by creating a source site and then translating the site into other languages, which can be published as separate sites. Q.What is Branding? Answer: Branding means to create and design the portal according to the organizational norms, by changing the title, logo, header, footer, and content to provide the look and feel that suite the organization. Creating custom-designed UIs, either on a traditional HTML page or in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, is known as branding. Branding of portals is done to achieve the unique corporate identity of an organization across the market. Q.What are Content pages? Answer: Content pages implement a master page. Content pages contain an attribute, which informs the compiler that the page should be, merged with a master page. This attribute is part of the page directive tag called the MasterPageFile. Q.What is Page Layout? Answer: Page layout dictates the overall look and feel of a web page. A page layout relies on a content type to determine the kind of content that can be stored on pages. Page layout contains field controls and web part. Q.What is Navigation in SharePoint 2010? Answer: Site navigation provides the primary interface for site users to move around on the sites and pages on the site. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes a set of customizable and extensible navigation features that help orient users of the site so they can move around on its sites and pages. Q.What are the various options for Navigation available in SharePoint 2010? Answer: Navigation controls on master pages Top link bar navigation Quick Launch navigation Breadcrumb navigation Tree view navigation Metadata navigation Navigation controls on page layouts Summary Links Table of Contents Content Query Navigation Web Parts Categories Site Aggregator Site in Category Tag Cloud The following navigation Web parts are available only on Publishing sites: Summary Links Table of Contents Q.What is Ribbon interface? Answer: Ribbon Interface act as the UI enhancement in the product. It provides the commands to be executed in the form of Icons and tabs. Q.What is a workflow? Answer: A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Q.Explain .Net Workflow and SharePoint workflow? Answer: Net Workflow: Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is a new programming framework introduced in .NET 3.0 for creating reactive programs. A reactive program typically represents a set of procedures or instructions used to capture and automate a specific business process. Windows Workflow Foundation supports publishing a workflow as an ASP.NET Web service on a Web server or server farm running ASP.NET on Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0. Because Windows Workflow Foundation Web service support is based on ASP.NET 2.0, it inherits most of the features of a standard ASP.NET Web service. SharePoint Workflow: SharePoint workflows are built on top of WWF. WSS extends the WWF. WSS extends the WWF by introducing the concept of a workflow template. The main purpose of the workflow template is to integrate WWF programs into WSS so that they can be installed, configured and parameterized for use. A workflow template is created by adding a Workflow element to a feature that is scoped to the level of the site collection. Q.What is Single sign-on? Answer: Single Sign-on allows users to log on to a variety of applications with the single username and password and user has to enter the details only once for all the applications. Q.What is ULS Logging? Answer: ULS Logging captures and writes events to trace logs. Q.What does RunWithElevatedPrivileges do? Answer: Assume that you have a Web Part in which you want to display information obtained through the Windows SharePoint Services object model, such as the name of the current site collection owner, usage statistics, or auditing information. These are examples of calls into the object model that require site- administration privileges. Your Web Part experiences an access-denied error if it attempts to obtain this information when the current user is not a site administrator. The request is initiated by a non-privileged user. You can still successfully make these calls into the object model by calling the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method provided by the SPSecurity class. C#: SPSite siteColl = SPContext.Current.Site; SPWeb site = SPContext.Current.Web;SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate() { using (SPSite ElevatedsiteColl = new SPSite(siteColl.ID)) { using (SPWeb ElevatedSite = ElevatedsiteColl.OpenWeb(site.ID)) { string SiteCollectionOwner = ElevatedsiteColl.Owner.Name; string Visits = ElevatedsiteColl.Usage.Visits.ToString();string RootAuditEntries ElevatedSite.RootFolder.Audit.GetEntries().Count.ToString(); }} }); Q.What is the difference between method activity and event activity in Work Flow? Answer: A method activity is one that performs an action, such as creating or updating a task. An event activity is one that runs in response to an action occurring. Q.What does SPWeb.EnsureUser method do? Answer: Checks whether the specified login name belongs to a valid user of the Web site, and if the login name does not already exist, adds it to the Web site. e.g SPUser usr = myWeb.EnsureUser("mmangaldas"); Q.How to query from multiple lists? Answer: Use SPSiteDataQuery to fetch data from multiple lists. Q.How Does SharePoint work? Answer: The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML. Q.What is the difference between Syncronous & Asyncronous events? Answer: Synchronous calls ending with 'ing' E.g. ItemDeleting Event Handler code execute BEFORE action is committed WSS waits for code to return Option to cancel and return error code Asynchronous calls ending with 'ed' E.g. ItemDeleted Event Handler code executes AFTER action is committed WSS does not wait for code to return Executed in its own Worker thread. Q.What is ServerUpdate() ? Answer: Any changes in the list, i.e. new addition or modification of an item.. the operation is complete by calling the Update method.But if a List is set to maintain versions .. and you are editing an item, but don't want to save it as a new version, then use the SystemUpdate method instead and pass in 'false' as the parameter. Q.How to work with large list in SharePoint Answer: List throttling is one of the new options in SharePoint 2010 that enable to set limits on how severely users can put the exhausted down on your servers. In a husk, what it does is allow you to set a limit for how many rows of data can be retrieved for a list or library at any one time. The most basic example of this would be if you had a list with thousands of items, and someone created a view that would return all of the items in the list in a single page. List throttling ensures that such a request would not be allowed to execute. The hit on the server is alleviated, and the user gets a nice little message that says sorry, we can’t retrieve all of the data you requested because it exceeds the throttle limit for this list. Q.How can you force SPQuery to return results from all the folders of the list? If you use SPQuery on any SPlist . It will bring back results from the current folder only. If you want to get results from all the folders in the list, then you need to specify the scope of the query by the use of ViewAttributes.. e.g. query.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"Recursive\""; Q.What is query.ViewAttributes / Answer: If you use SPQuery on any SPlist . It will bring back results from the current folder only. If you want to get results from all the folders in the list. Then you need to specify the scope of the query by the use of ViewAttributes.. e.g. query.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"Recursive\""; Q.What is List View Threshold Answer: This is the maximum number of items that can be retrieved in one request. The default value is 5,000. Important to note as well, the smallest you make this value is 2,000. Q.How to override List throttling using object model Answer: Using List Object Model SPList list = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists; list.EnableThrottling = false; SPListItemCollection items = list.GetItems(listQuery); Use in SPQuery SPQuery listQuery = new SPQuery(); listQuery.Query = query; listQuery.QueryThrottleMode = SPQueryThrottleOption.Override; SPList list = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists; SPListItemCollection items = list.GetItems(listQuery); Q.Difference between Close() and Dispose() Method Answer: The basic difference between Close() and Dispose() is, when a Close() method is called, any managed resource can be temporarily closed and can be opened once again. It means that, with the same object the resource can be reopened or used. Where as Dispose () method permanently removes any resource ((un)managed) from memory for cleanup and the resource no longer exists for any further processing. Q.What is the use of “Form Digest” control? Answer: The FormDigest control generates a security validation, or message digest, to help prevent the type of attack whereby a user is tricked into posting data to the server without knowing it. The security validation is specific to a user, site, and time period and expires after a configurable amount of time. When the user requests a page, the server returns the page with security validation inserted. When the user then submits the form, the server verifies that the security validation has not changed. Q.What is the structure of the InfoPath form data? Document based Form: Hierarchical List based Form: Flat Q.How to debug InfoPath 2010 WebForm? Build in Debug mode (Project Properties > Build > Active (Debug) Enable full Debug Info (Project Properties > Build > Advanced) Clear "Enable Just My Code" and select "Suppress JIT..." (Tools > Options > Debugging) Then you can deploy your template and attach to either the correct w3wp process or the SPUCWorkerProcess for a sandboxed solution - for this you will need to use Visual Studio. Q.Use of InfoPath form Web part? Answer: It is used to show the published InfoPath form in SharePoint webpages. Q.What are the types of input forms that can be created for a workflow? Answer: You can create four different types of input forms including An association form An initiation form A modification form A Task edits form. Q.What is a sandbox solution Answer: One of the biggest problems with SharePoint 2007 development is that all of its solutions run with full trust. This makes SharePoint administrators hesitant to publish any solution that may disturb the stability of the SharePoint farm. Sandboxed Solutions, new in SharePoint 2010, address this by allowing site collection administrators to deploy solutions that are safe to run. The Sandboxed Solution is effectively a process separation engine, designed to allow code within the sandbox to run in a separate worker process thread, thereby moderating the concern that an overly busy application pool will interfere with other normal operations. Q.What is the use of Sandbox Solution? Answer: In the SharePoint 2007 environment, many companies feel they need to separate even their normal business process data from custom applications developed using SharePoint as an access mechanism, by placing these applications under a separate application pool and thus preventing development changes from affecting the server. Sandboxed Solutions are aimed at creating business agility. This helps to satisfy the demanding nature of business by quickly creating and deploying solutions. Businesses can deploy these solutions rapidly because there's less risk and less need for a review process to slow them down. Site collection administrators can even deploy third-party solutions without fear of bringing down the entire farm Q.What all SharePoint item types supported by Sandbox Solutions? Answer: List definitions List instances Content Types/Fields Navigation Web Parts derived from Web Part Event receivers Custom Workflow Actions Workflows Q.How to monitor Sandbox solution Answer: Site Collection administrator can monitor resource usage of Sandboxed Solutions via Site ActionsàSite Settingsà Galleriesà Solutions. The simple dashboard shows how much resources have been consumed by deployed solutions. Q.What is Service Application module in SharePoint Answer: In SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Providers (SSP's) are replaced by Service Applications. Services are no longer combined into a SSP. They are running independent as a service application. The service application architecture is now also built into Microsoft SharePoint, in contrast to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) architecture that was only part of Office SharePoint Server 2007. A key benefit here is that all services are installed by default and there is no SSP setup additionally. The services architecture is extensible, allowing third-party companies to build and add services to the platform. Services are managed directly in Central Administration (In SSP it was a separate administration site). Services can be monitored and managed remotely. Services can be managed and scripted by Windows PowerShell Shared services communications take place over HTTP(S). Shared services do not directly access databases across farms. Most new services are built on the Windows Communications Framework. They have optimization built into their protocol, using binary streams instead of XML for data transfer. Test results show improvements in network throughput with this change. Q.What is the limitation and advantages of SSP and Service Applications? Answer: The key limitation of the SSP architecture was that it was configured by using a set of services, and all Web applications associated with the SSP bore the overhead of all the services even if they weren't being used. To change the service configuration for a particular Web application, a new SSP would have to be created. The service application architecture on the other hand, allows a set of services to be associated with a given Web application and a different set of services to be associated with another Web application. Also, the same service application can be configured differently in different Web applications; therefore, Web sites can be configured to use only the services that are needed, rather than the entire bank of services. Similar to the SSP model in Office SharePoint Server 2007, a single set of services can be shared by all sites in a farm. By publishing a service application (from the sharing group, under Service application tab), you can share it across server farms. This capability does not apply to all service applications, and some services can be shared only within a single server farm. The service application model provides a suitable approach to addressing the scalability and delegation issues with SSPs and also is a fundamental enabler for a much wider feature capability in SharePoint 2010. Indeed the service application model pushes Microsoft's most "service orientated" product vastly further ahead in the realm of distributed application platform sanitation. The service application model allows SharePoint 2010 to scale further than ever before, way further. It also introduces flexibility with respect to deployment that is unmatched in the marketplace. Q.What is Enterprise Metadata Management? Answer: Enterprise metadata management is a set of features introduced in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that enable taxonomists, librarians, and administrators to create and manage terms and sets of terms across the enterprise. Q.What Changes are made in SharePoint 2010 to enforce Referential Integrity? Answer: In SharePoint 2010, Referential Integrity is enforced using two options, available with Look-up columns. While creating a Look-up column, you can either choose a) Restrict Delete or b) Cascade Delete to define a relationship between the Look-up list and the list containing the look-up Column Q.Where can I use InfoPath? Answer: With InfoPath, you can simply develop Web Services "hooks" that allow data to be submitted to and retrieved from a variety of applications. Developers can use InfoPath to quickly create new, feature-rich user interfaces to those legacy applications. This process is both much faster and less expensive than the task of re-engineering the legacy application, and can result in a huge cost saving. You can transfer and re-use data with InfoPath, as its base is XML and so it’s now easy to exchange data between two incompatible systems. Q.Core Advantage of using InfoPath Answer: · Ability to communicate between two Incompatible data format · Browser-Compatible Form Broader usage scope, it gets easily integral with other office product. Offline support, InfoPath forms don't have to be filled out while a user is connected to a network. Users can save forms to their computer, work on them offline, and then submit them to the corporate network when they are reconnected. Low cost and Fast Development Q.What are the elements we can apply workflow? Answer: · At the level of a list (or document library) At the level of a content type defined at site scope · At the level of a site ( SharePoint 2010 ) Q.What are the ways to initiate the workflow? Answer: Automatic (on item added or item updated) Manual (standard UI interface) Manual (Custom UI Interface) Programmatically through custom code Q.What are ways to create input forms for workflow? Answer: Two different approaches can be used to develop custom input forms for a workflow template. You can create your forms by Using custom application pages, which are standard .aspx pages deployed to run out of the _layouts directory Using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2010 Q.What is the difference between method activity and event activity in Workflow? Answer: A method activity is one that performs an action, such as creating or updating a task. An event activity is one that runs in response to an action occurring. Q.How Does SharePoint work? Answer: The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the SharePoint, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML. Q.What is ServerUpdate()? Answer: Any changes in the list new addition or modification of an item the operation is complete by calling the Update method. But if a List is set to maintain versions and you are editing an item, but don't want to save it as a new version, then use the System Update method instead and pass in 'false' as the parameter. Q.How can you force SPQuery to return results from all the folders of the list? Answer: If you use SPQuery on any SPlist it will bring back results from the current folder only.If you want to get results from all the folders in the list then you need to specify the scope of the query by the use of ViewAttributes.. e.g. query.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"Recursive\""; Q.What are the service applications that have its own database in SharePoint 2013 Answer: App Management Service (new) Business Data Connectivity Managed Metadata Service Search Secure Store Service Machine Translation Services (new) State Service Usage and Health Data Collection User Profile Service Application Word Automation Service Access Services App databases (new) (2010 and 2013) Q.Which are the service applications that should run in Web front end and application servers? Answer: In web front end Servers SharePoint Foundation Web Application Inbound email In application servers You can decide which services should run in each app Server. But you should make sure SharePoint Foundation Web Application service should be stopped in App Server. The Service Application Model also allows us to deploy more than one instance of the same Service Application Q.What are the core capabilities of SharePoint 2013 Answer: Below are some major additions are revisions Education Module. SharePoint 2013 has a new education module that enables administrators to create a fully-functional e-learning system in their SharePoint farm. Request Management. Administrators can use the Request Management feature to distribute Incoming requests across Web Front-End servers in the SharePoint farm. For example, they can use static weights to route more requests to a new, high specification server and thus take load off an older, slower server. You could also route all requests from a particular browser, such as IE9, through a specific server or deny requests from certain IP address ranges. Shredded Storage. When users make changes to documents, SharePoint 2013 can apply those Changes to the document in the content database without a full refresh of the whole document. If only a single change has been made to a large document, this can enormously reduce the quantity of data sent over the network and, if versioning is used, the volume of the content database. Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Many improvements have been made to ECM especially in the field of eDiscovery, which is the process of locating all document records that relate to a specific subject or legal case. You can also use Team Folders to consolidate content stored in SharePoint and Exchange. Web Content Management (WCM). In SharePoint 2013, the structure and navigation of a WCM site is defined by managed metadata terms. This approach is highly flexible and enables administrators to reorganize their entire Web site without moving any content. Search. In SharePoint 2013 there is a single Search engine that combines the best features of the SharePoint and FAST search engines in SharePoint 2010. New configuration objects, such as Query Rules and Result Types allow administrators to customize result sets to an unprecedented level. Client object model (CSOM). The CSOM existed in SharePoint 2010 but has been greatly extended in SharePoint 2013 to enable Q.What is Apps for SharePoint 2013? What is the different type associated with the same Answer: In SharePoint 2013 there is a new custom component called the apps for SharePoint. This is the Recommended way for developers and third parties to create new functionality and user interface components. We will see, later in this module and throughout this course how developers create these Apps. However the SharePoint 2013 Apps infrastructure also benefits SharePoint administrators by making it easier to manage the life cycle of custom applications. The following features are included: SharePoint Marketplace. This global marketplace for apps for SharePoint is a single repository of custom components, available to all SharePoint customers. Administrators can enable users to purchase apps, on behalf of the company from the marketplace, or restrict that right to a small number of budget holders. Once purchased, an app becomes available to all users in the SharePoint farm. Corporate App Catalog. This catalog is a private repository of apps within the SharePoint farm and controlled by farm administrators. Users can choose to install these apps in any SharePoint site in the organization. Removing Apps. Apps for SharePoint is contained entirely within a sub-site of the SharePoint site in which it is used. Therefore, when a user or administrator removes the app, the sub-site is removed cleanly and no objects are retained in the parent site or elsewhere. This clean removal aids app management. Apps in Multi-Tenant Farms. In a multi-tenant SharePoint farm, there is a one Corporate App Catalog for each tenant organization. This ensures that both tenants must pay for their app usage and that removals do not impact other tenants Q.What is the change associated with new Visual Web Part in SharePoint 2013? Answer: A new Visual Web Part Template has been added to Visual Studio 2012 for Creating Visual Web parts for SharePoint 2013. In this new Template both the User Control and Web Part Classes are merged to create one template unlike SharePoint 2010 where you had a separate ascx and web part file. Also, now you can create both Sandbox and Farm solutions using Visual Web Part Template. Q.What is TilesViewWebPart in SharePoint 2013? Answer: SharePoint 2013 Introduces a new “Getting Started” Web Part that has “Tiles” to provide an easy access to some of the main links in the Site like – adding lists or libraries, Creating master page etc. To Programmatically Create this new Web Part a new abstract base class TilesViewWebPart has been added in SharePoint API.You have to Create a Custom Web part and Inherit from TilesViewWebpart and Override GetTiles() to Create Custom tiles. This be good branding solution in SharePoint 2013 Q.How we can you Create & Deploy Sandbox Solutions in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Sandbox Solutions are depreciated in SharePoint 2013.You can still create them and deploy them but they are not much compatible. I suggest to go for Apps model in these scenarios. Q.How we can force a Solution to be deployed to 15 Hive and not 14 Hive? Answer: If the solution was Created in Visual Studio 2010, we have to would add SharePoint Version=”15.0″ attribute in Solution’s manifest.xml file to force it to deploy in 15 Hive instead of 14 Hive. If the Solution however is created in Visual Studio 2012, you don’t need to do anything; it gets deployed to 15 Hive by default. Q.Is it possible to deploy Master Page and Custom Css from SharePoint 2010 in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Master Pages and CSS have changed a lot in SharePoint 2013. We can deploy a master page in Master page gallery but the styles from old core.css need to be updated. Q.Is it possible to use fabulous 40 templates in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Microsoft is not creating any New Versions of these Templates. The old Sites based on these templates can be upgraded only if the Templates are installed successfully in SharePoint 2013. Q.Do we have any support for PDF in SharePoint 2013 Answer: SharePoint 2013 now offers some Out-of-box support for PDF.PDF icon is now natively supported and PDF when opened in SharePoint 2013 will try to open in the Adobe Reader and prompt user to either checkout & open or open the file in PDF directly. Q.Do you have any idea about “Digital Content types”? Answer: In SharePoint 2013 Microsoft has introduced a new set of content types called “Digital Asset Content Types” for better use of Audio, Video and Images as Web Content. These content types can be added to any library and can be used as a one of the items files. Q.What are the types of players that we can used to play SharePoint 2013 Video files? Answer: SharePoint 2013 supports two Video players – HTML 5 player and a Silverlight ` player. SharePoint chooses the player automatically, depending on the video format that it meets in the video set. For example, if the format can’t be played on the HTML 5 player, the SharePoint uses the Silverlight player for playing it. Q.Can we embed Video from external sites like YouTube in SharePoint 2013 Answer: SharePoint 2013 have natives support for IFrames.We can now embed dynamic content from other sites, such as YouTube videos or maps to any SharePoint site by using IFrames. We need to add the Domain for the external site in “HTML Field Security first. Q.Do you have any idea about Cross-Site Publishing? Answer: Cross-Site Publishing is a new Feature in SharePoint Server 2013 that enables you to reuse content across site collections, web applications, and farms. You can use cross-site publishing to Create branded Internet, intranet and extranet publishing sites. Q.Is Sharepoint 2013 have better performance compared to earlier versions? If so how? Answer: SharePoint 2013 Introduces Minimal Download Strategy and Distributed Cache Service to Improve Page Load; and Shredded Storage to Improve Storage required for saving files. Office web apps integration with SharePoint is also a added addition for the browser based rendering of Office document. Q.What is Distributed Cache Service? Answer: The Distributed Cache service provides caching features in SharePoint Server 2013. The microblog features and feeds rely on the Distributed Cache to store data for very fast retrieval across all entities. The Distributed Cache service is built on Windows Server AppFabric, which implements the AppFabric Caching service. Windows Server AppFabric installs with the prerequisites for SharePoint Server 2013. The Distributed Cache service is either required by or improves performance of the following features: Authentication Newsfeeds OneNote client access Security Trimming Page load performance Q.What is Shredded Storage? Answer: With Shredded Storage feature enabled, every document and the Changes made to the document, is stored in SQL as multiple “Shredded BLOBS“. Whenever a new Version of a document is created, only the BLOBs of the document that Corresponds to the Change are saved as opposed to the entire document as a new version. This feature helps to lower down the amount of storage required for saving files. In SharePoint 2010 when saving a document, such as a documented opened from SharePoint with the Office 2010 client, only the incremental change to the document are submitted over the network from the client to the server; however, the document is coalesced on the Web server requiring a full read from the database server, and subsequently the new file inclusive of the change are written to the database server. Shredded Storage at its most basic is designed to ensure the write cost of updating a document is proportional to the size of the change, and not of the file itself. Q.What does the e Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013? Answer: The Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint Server 2013 analyzes both the Content and the way users interact with it.The results from the analysis are added to the items in the search index to be used by Search Web parts, Recommendation Reports, Most Popular Items reports and other Web Parts. Q.What are Device Channels in SharePoint 2013? Answer: With device channels in SharePoint 2013, you can render a single publishing site in multiple ways by using different designs that target different devices for example mobile devices etc. These device channels can each be given a different master page and CSS file to give users a more optimal viewing experience. For more Info see Plan device channels in SharePoint Server 2013 Q.What are the ways an app communicate with SharePoint? Answer: We have two options REST and JavaScript APIs Managed APIs (.NET) Q.What are the options available to publish an app? Answer: Public SharePoint app store-Which will be public Organization’s app catalog-Which is specific to the organization Q.What is meant by OData in SharePoint 2013 Answer: The Open Data protocol (OData) lets you access a data source, such as a database, by browsing to a specially constructed URL. The Open Data protocol (OData) lets you access a data source, such as a database, by browsing to a specially constructed URL. This allows for a simplified approach for connecting to and working with data sources that are hosted within an organization. OData is a protocol that uses HTTP, Atom, and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to enable developers to write applications that communicate with an ever-growing number of data sources. Microsoft supports the creation of this standard as a way to enable the exchange of data between applications and data stores that can be accessed from the web. Q.What is the use of OData? Answer: This is the most simplified approach for connecting and working with data sources that are hosted within an organization. Q.What is an OData producer, and some examples? Answer: OData Producers expose their data in a structured way through web service. SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Azure, Windows Azure Table Storage, Windows Azure Marketplace, SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and Windows Live can be considered for the examples of the same. For SharePoint to use the data exposed by a specific OData producer, an external content type must be created inside SharePoint. As with all SharePoint external content types, it contains all the connectivity information that is needed to connect and communicate with the external system. Q.What is the use of OAuth in SharePoint 2013? Answer: To authorize requests by an app for SharePoint to access SharePoint resources on behalf of a user and to authenticate apps in the Office Store, an app catalog, or a developer tenant. In the case of app authentication, the authentication process verifies a claim that is made by a subject that it should be allowed to act on behalf of a given principal. Apps can be authenticated in several different ways. When a call is made to an app web, for example, unless that call is an OAuth call, the call is attributed to the app associated with the app web. If it is an OAuth call, SharePoint 2013 uses the Windows Azure Access Control Service as the app identity provider. OAuth is one of several ways for an app to be authenticated, but authorization is consistent across all apps, regardless of whether the apps use OAuth. Q.What is a workflow stage shape in SharePoint Designer 2013? Answer: Workflows in SharePoint Designer 2013 now include the notions of stages, loops, and steps. Workflow authors can group a number of individual actions and conditions as a single unit to more clearly define the process. For example, there could be an Approval or Request Feedback stage or step. Within that stage or step would be all of the actions that are necessary for that process. The stage or step itself might be one node of a longer workflow and would allow a viewer to see the status of that stage as a whole, rather than a set of individual actions. A stage can contain any number of shapes and may include branching. The stage or step itself might be one node of a longer workflow. Q.What is the Machine Translation Service? Answer: Using machine translation will allow users to send content to Microsoft for translation. Microsoft may use content users send us to improve the quality of translations. If you use the Machine Translation Service in your application, you are responsible for informing users that this application will allow users to send content to Microsoft for translation and that Microsoft may use content users send us to improve the quality of translations. See Microsoft Translator Privacy for more information. Machine Translation Service is a new service application in SharePoint 2013 that provides automatic machine translation of files and sites. When the Machine Translation Service application processes a translation request, it forwards the request to a cloud-hosted machine translation service, where the actual translation work is performed. The Machine Translation Service application processes translation requests asynchronously and synchronously. Asynchronous translation requests are processed when the translation timer job executes. The default interval of the translation timer job is 15 minutes; you can manage this setting in Central Administration or by using Windows PowerShell. Q.What is PowerPoint Automation Services? Answer: Many businesses, large and small, use their Microsoft SharePoint Server libraries as a repository for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. These businesses all have their own particular needs for storing, distributing, and updating their presentations. Microsoft PowerPoint Automation Services is a new feature of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 that can help enterprises to manage their presentations. It is a shared service that provides unattended, server-side conversion of presentations into other formats. It was designed from the outset to work on servers and can process many presentation files in a reliable and predictable manner. Using PowerPoint Automation Services, you can convert from the PowerPoint binary file format (.ppt) and the PowerPoint Open XML file format (.pptx) to other formats. For example, you may want to upgrade a batch of PowerPoint 97–2003 files to Open XML presentation files. You could also create a custom action in the Edit menu to allow users to create a PDF version of presentations on demand. Q.How can you add a HTML Master Page & Css with Design Manager SharePoint 2013 Answer: In SharePoint 2013 you can easily Use HTML Master page along with its CSS and Images for the look and feel of your SharePoint site. You do not need to work on SharePoint designer anymore. The new tool is called Design Manager. Its actually not a tool or anything its a new feature added to Look and Feel in Site settings. The Design Manager assists in creating the master page from simple HTML, CSS files. The SharePoint designers or Admins only need to create these designs on an HTML editor or Notepad and Convert that into HTML, CSS and Images. Once these artifacts are ready, the design manager can process these to generate a master page. Q.What are the three user authentication methods that SharePoint 2013 supports? Answer: Windows claims Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-based claims Forms-based authentication claims Q.Which one is the most recommended method Answer: Claims-based authentication methods are recommended Q.What types of authentication does Business Connectivity Services support? Answer: a. Anonymous Basic Windows Custom authentication to OData services when it is used with the Secure Store Service Q.What Is An Event Listener in SharePoint 2013? What is the use of it? Answer: The event listener includes an event subscriber. The subscriber receives notifications from the event publisher (on the external system side) on changes to the data and then initiates predefined actions when changes occur it Enables SharePoint users and custom code to receive notifications of events that occur in an external system. The supported connections for an external system? OData SQL WCF Q.What are the new improvements in Excel Services in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Field list and field well support Calculated measures and members Enhanced timeline controls Application BI Servers Business Intelligence Center update Q.What are Community Sites in SharePoint 2013? Answer: Community Sites offer a forum experience to categorize and cultivate discussions with a broad group of people across organizations in a company. Q.What is a ranking model in SharePoint 2013 search? Answer: A ranking model determines recall (which items are displayed in the search results) and rank (the order in which search results are displayed). Q.What is a Continuous crawl? Answer: Eliminates the need to schedule incremental crawls and automatically starts crawls as necessary to keep the search index fresh. Q.What does document parsing functionality do? Answer: Document parsers extract useful metadata and remove redundant information. Q.Is Visual Upgrade available in SharePoint 2013? Answer: It is not available. Site collection administrator can either go for visual upgrade from the site settings Q.What is the use of Stemming in SharePoint Search? Answer: Stemming is a feature of the word breaker component used only by the query engine to determine where the word boundaries are in the stream of characters in the query. A stemmer extracts the root form of a given word. For example, ”running,” ”ran,” and ”runner“ are all variants of the verb ”to run.” Q.What is the use of Word breaking in SharePoint Search? Answer: A word breaker is a component used by the query and index engines to break compound words and phrases into individual words or tokens. If there is no word breaker for a specific language, the neutral word breaker is used, in which case word breaking occurs where there are white spaces between the words and phrases. Q.What is the use of RB and RBS protocol in SharePoint Search? Answer: RB & RBS protocols are used to index Exchange server’s public folder. Q.Capabilities of Fast Search in SharePoint 2013 Answer: Content-processing pipeline Metadata extraction Structured data search Deep refinement Visual search Visual best bets Development platform flexibility Ease of creating custom search experiences Extreme scale and performance Q.What are the uses of “Refiners” in SharePoint Search? Answer: Refiners which provide the ability filter down the search results using the returned metadata without have to re-run the actual search. Q.What are the features of Federated Search? Answer: No additional capacity requirements for the content index, as content are not crawled by SharePoint Enterprise Search. Can take advantage of a repository’s existing search engine. For example, you can federate to an Internet search engine to search the Web. Can access repositories that are secured against crawls, but which can be accessed by search queries. Q.Difference between list and library? Answer: A list contains items that are collections of fields/properties/columns. Optionally each item can have one or more attachments. A library is a list, but has one and exactly one file associated with each item. A library item also has fields/properties/columns. Simple way to say this is that a list item has a focus on "text" stored in fields/properties/columns, while a library has a focus on a single document. Checking option: SharePoint list doesn’t support check in and check out options but SharePoint Library supports. Search: When the user searches for a keyword in a document, if the document is in a list then search returns the list item as the result. When the user searches for a keyword in a document, if the document is in a library then they find the document listed in the search results. List examples: Contact lists, Task lists etc. Library examples: Picture library, Form library etc. Q.What is External list throttling Answer: Same as internal list throttling, SharePoint also supports External list throttling. External lists are lists that are connected to other systems using BCS and External content type. Q.What is your understanding on Column validation rules? Answer: A validation formula at the column level cannot include any other columns besides itself. For example, > is an invalid formula and SharePoint will not allow it to be used at the column level. In this case, you want to use list-level validation. Q.How to do validation if the field values don’t allow more than 8? Answer: Formula = LEN () Today () formulae in column validation while creating the “Due Date” field. Q.Why should you not use Render ()? Answer: A. Basically the WPSC provides developers with a SharePoint specific client-side DOM that allows developers to listen for events, interact with Web Parts and even set properties. all through script on the client. The WPSC is implemented using a bunch of client-side code. You can see a snippet of it if you look at the source of a SharePoint page. When SharePoint renders the page, it adds a unique ID to the HTML as well as a unique ID to the ... developers can use these ID's to get to the Web Part via client-side code. When you use RenderContents() or CreateChildControls(), the rendered markup produced by those methods is put inside the . If you override Render(), you are replacing the entire ! Thus, by replacing the entire table, you are breaking the WPSC... the whole SharePoint specific DOM. Q.What is claims based authentication? Answer: Claims is a new authentication method that SharePoint 2010 can utilize. This allows a single authentication store for multiple types of authentication (Windows NTLM, SQL FBA, LDAP, etc) which allows all of these types of authentication to access SharePoint under a single URL.Claims creates a SAML token based on the sign-in, that contains the user’s identity. Q.How do we use the claims identity outside of SharePoint? Answer: LOB systems External partner services Separate SharePoint farms Q.What is LINQ to Sharepoint? Answer: LINQ is a feature of the programming languages C# 3.0 and Visual Basic .NET LINQ adds, to each of the languages, a SQL-like syntax and vocabulary for querying data sources. LINQ to Sharepoint allows developers to use SQL-like syntax to query Lists LINQ to Sharepoint internally converts the LINQ query to a CAML query to fetch records Advantage: Strongly typed access to the entities of the list. Disadvantage: If the new columns are added or its data type changed, the data context class used by LINQ is no longer valid and may break the code Q.Do you know any tools that can be used to create DataContent classes for Use in LINQ queries? Answer: SPMetal.exe Q.What are the advantages and disadvantages of LINQ to Sharepoint ? Answer: Advantages: Intellisense Strongly typed access to the entities of the list Faster development Simplify complex queries Disadvantages: If the new columns are added or its datatype changed, the datacontext class used by LINQ is no longer valid and may break the codeExtra layer to the actual CAML query Q.Can a workflow created in Sharepoint Designer be edited in Visual Studio? Answer: Yes. If you have created the work flow as reusable. You can import the same n Visual studio and update it Q.Can MS Visio be used to create a Sharepoint workflow? Answer: MS Visio cannot be used to create the Sharepoint workflow itself, but can be used for workflow visualization. What this means is that, the flow diagram designed in Visio can be imported in Sharepoint Designer where all the functionality can be added and deployed to Sharepoint. Q.What are the two base classes a WebPart you are going to use within SharePoint can inherit from? Answer: There are two base classes that a WebPart which is going to be consumed by SharePoint can inherit from, either the SharePoint WebPart Base class or the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part base class. When inheriting from the SharePoint WebPart Base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart. When inheriting from the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart. It is considered good practice to use the ASP.NET WebPart base class since the old base class is meant for backwards compatibility with previous version of SharePoint, however there are four exception when it is better to leverage functionality from the SharePoint WebPart base class: Cross page connections Connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone Client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component) Data caching infrastructure Q.What is the primary benefit of OData? Answer: Simplified approach for connecting to and working with data sources that are hosted within an organization. Q.What technologies does OData use? Answer:HTTP Atom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Q.How can you avoid direct code against the OData source? Answer: Business Connectivity Services (BCS) can communicate with OData sources, or producers, without having to code directly to the OData source. Q.What is an OData producer, and some examples? Answer: Producers expose their data in a structured way via a web service. Examples include SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Azure, Windows Azure Table Storage, Windows Azure Marketplace, SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Windows Live. Q.What is OAuth? Answer: An open protocol for authorization. Q.What does OAuth enable? Answer: Secure authorization from desktop and web applications in a simple and standard way. Q.What is OAuth used? Answer: To authorize requests by an app for SharePoint to access SharePoint resources on behalf of a user and to authenticate apps in the Office Store, an app catalog, or a developer tenant. Q.What is an Access token? Answer: Access tokens are issued by the OAuth security token service (STS) to request app permissions. Q.What are the three types of authorization policies? Answer: user-only policy, user + app policy, or app-only policy Q.How does an app for SharePoint requests permissions to access SharePoint resources? Answer: An app for SharePoint requests the permissions that it needs during installation from the user who is installing it and then the developer of an app must request, through the app manifest file, the permissions an app needs. Q.How is an app granted the permissions requested? Answer: An app must be granted permissions by the user who is installing it and users can grant only the permissions that they have; the user installing the app must be able to grant all permissions required by the app, or app installation fails.

SQL Server 2008 Interview Questions

Q.What Is Cursor? Ans: Cursor is a database object used by applications to manipulate data in a set on a row-by-row basis, instead of the typical SQL commands that operate on all the rows in the set at one time. In order to work with a cursor we need to perform some steps in the following order: • Declare cursor • Open cursor • Fetch row from the cursor • Process fetched row • Close cursor • Deallocate cursor Q.What Is Collation? Ans: Collation refers to a set of rules that determine how data is sorted and compared. Character data is sorted using rules that define the correct character sequence, with options for specifying case sensitivity, accent marks, character types and character width. Q.What Is Difference Between Function And Stored Procedure? Ans: UDF can be used in the SQL statements anywhere in the WHERE/HAVING/SELECT section where as Stored procedures cannot be. UDFs that return tables can be treated as another rowset. This can be used in JOINs with other tables. Inline UDF’s can be thought of as views that take parameters and can be used in JOINs and other Rowset operations. Q.What Is Sub-query? Explain Properties Of Sub-query? Ans: Sub-queries are often referred to as sub-selects, as they allow a SELECT statement to be executed arbitrarily within the body of another SQL statement. A sub-query is executed by enclosing it in a set of parentheses. Sub-queries are generally used to return a single row as an atomic value, though they may be used to compare values against multiple rows with the IN keyword. A subquery is a SELECT statement that is nested within another T-SQL statement. A subquery SELECT statement if executed independently of the T-SQL statement, in which it is nested, will return a resultset. Meaning a subquery SELECT statement can standalone and is not depended on the statement in which it is nested. A subquery SELECT statement can return any number of values, and can be found in, the column list of a SELECT statement, FROM, GROUP BY, HAVING, and/or ORDER BY clauses of a T-SQL statement. A Subquery can also be used as a parameter to a function call. Basically a subquery can be used anywhere an expression can be used. Q.What Are Different Types Of Join? Ans: Cross Join A cross join that does not have a WHERE clause produces the Cartesian product of the tables involved in the join. The size of a Cartesian product result set is the number of rows in the first table multiplied by the number of rows in the second table. The common example is when company wants to combine each product with a pricing table to analyze each product at each price. Inner Join A join that displays only the rows that have a match in both joined tables is known as inner Join. This is the default type of join in the Query and View Designer. Outer Join A join that includes rows even if they do not have related rows in the joined table is an Outer Join. You can create three different outer join to specify the unmatched rows to be included: • Left Outer Join: In Left Outer Join all rows in the first-named table i.e. “left” table, which appears leftmost in the JOIN clause are included. Unmatched rows in the right table do not appear. • Right Outer Join: In Right Outer Join all rows in the second-named table i.e. “right” table, which appears rightmost in the JOIN clause are included. Unmatched rows in the left table are not included. • Full Outer Join: In Full Outer Join all rows in all joined tables are included, whether they are matched or not. Self Join This is a particular case when one table joins to itself, with one or two aliases to avoid confusion. A self join can be of any type, as long as the joined tables are the same. A self join is rather unique in that it involves a relationship with only one table. The common example is when company has a hierarchal reporting structure whereby one member of staff reports to another. Self Join can be Outer Join or Inner Join. Q.What Are Primary Keys And Foreign Keys? Ans: Primary keys are the unique identifiers for each row. They must contain unique values and cannot be null. Due to their importance in relational databases, Primary keys are the most fundamental of all keys and constraints. A table can have only one Primary key. Foreign keys are both a method of ensuring data integrity and a manifestation of the relationship between tables. Q.What Is User Defined Functions? What Kind Of User-defined Functions Can Be Created? Ans: User-Defined Functions allow defining its own T-SQL functions that can accept 0 or more parameters and return a single scalar data value or a table data type. Different Kinds of User-Defined Functions created are: Scalar User-Defined Function A Scalar user-defined function returns one of the scalar data types. Text, ntext, image and timestamp data types are not supported. These are the type of user-defined functions that most developers are used to in other programming languages. You pass in 0 to many parameters and you get a return value. Inline Table-Value User-Defined Function An Inline Table-Value user-defined function returns a table data type and is an exceptional alternative to a view as the user-defined function can pass parameters into a T-SQL select command and in essence provide us with a parameterized, non-updateable view of the underlying tables. Multi-statement Table-Value User-Defined Function A Multi-Statement Table-Value user-defined function returns a table and is also an exceptional alternative to a view as the function can support multiple T-SQL statements to build the final result where the view is limited to a single SELECT statement. Also, the ability to pass parameters into a TSQL select command or a group of them gives us the capability to in essence create a parameterized, non-updateable view of the data in the underlying tables. Within the create function command you must define the table structure that is being returned. After creating this type of user-defined function, It can be used in the FROM clause of a T-SQL command unlike the behavior found when using a stored procedure which can also return record sets. Q.What Is Identity? Ans: Identity (or AutoNumber) is a column that automatically generates numeric values. A start and increment value can be set, but most DBA leave these at 1. A GUID column also generates numbers; the value of this cannot be controlled. Identity/GUID columns do not need to be indexed. Q.What Is Datawarehousing? Ans:Subject-oriented, meaning that the data in the database is organized so that all the data elements relating to the same real-world event or object are linked together; • Time-variant, meaning that the changes to the data in the database are tracked and recorded so that reports can be produced showing changes over time; • Non-volatile, meaning that data in the database is never over-written or deleted, once committed, the data is static, read-only, but retained for future reporting. • Integrated, meaning that the database contains data from most or all of an organization’s operational applications, and that this data is made consistent. Q.What Is Rdbms? Ans: Relational Data Base Management Systems (RDBMS) are database management systems that maintain data records and indices in tables. Relationships may be created and maintained across and among the data and tables. In a relational database, relationships between data items are expressed by means of tables. Interdependencies among these tables are expressed by data values rather than by pointers. This allows a high degree of data independence. An RDBMS has the capability to recombine the data items from different files, providing powerful tools for data usage. Q.What Are The Properties Of The Relational Tables? Ans: Relational tables have six properties: • Values are atomic. • Column values are of the same kind. • Each row is unique. • The sequence of columns is insignificant. • The sequence of rows is insignificant. • Each column must have a unique name. Q.What Is Normalization? Ans: Database normalization is a data design and organization process applied to data structures based on rules that help building relational databases. In relational database design, the process of organizing data to minimize redundancy is called normalization. Normalization usually involves dividing a database into two or more tables and defining relationships between the tables. The objective is to isolate data so that additions, deletions, and modifications of a field can be made in just one table and then propagated through the rest of the database via the defined relationships. Q.What Are Different Normalization Forms? Ans: 1NF: Eliminate Repeating Groups Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. Each field contains at most one value from its attribute domain. 2NF: Eliminate Redundant Data If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table. 3NF: Eliminate Columns Not Dependent On Key If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. All attributes must be directly dependent on the primary key. BCNF: Boyce-Codd Normal Form If there are non-trivial dependencies between candidate key attributes, separate them out into distinct tables. 4NF: Isolate Independent Multiple Relationships No table may contain two or more 1:n or n:m relationships that are not directly related. 5NF: Isolate Semantically Related Multiple Relationships There may be practical constrains on information that justify separating logically related many-to-many relationships. ONF: Optimal Normal Form A model limited to only simple (elemental) facts, as expressed in Object Role Model notation. DKNF: Domain-Key Normal Form A model free from all modification anomalies is said to be in DKNF. Remember, these normalization guidelines are cumulative. For a database to be in 3NF, it must first fulfill all the criteria of a 2NF and 1NF database. Q.What Is De-normalization? Ans: De-normalization is the process of attempting to optimize the performance of a database by adding redundant data. It is sometimes necessary because current DBMSs implement the relational model poorly. A true relational DBMS would allow for a fully normalized database at the logical level, while providing physical storage of data that is tuned for high performance. De-normalization is a technique to move from higher to lower normal forms of database modeling in order to speed up database access. Q.What Is Stored Procedure? Ans: A stored procedure is a named group of SQL statements that have been previously created and stored in the server database. Stored procedures accept input parameters so that a single procedure can be used over the network by several clients using different input data. And when the procedure is modified, all clients automatically get the new version. Stored procedures reduce network traffic and improve performance. Stored procedures can be used to help ensure the integrity of the database. e.g. sp_helpdb, sp_renamedb, sp_depends etc. Q.What Is Trigger? Ans: A trigger is a SQL procedure that initiates an action when an event (INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE) occurs. Triggers are stored in and managed by the DBMS. Triggers are used to maintain the referential integrity of data by changing the data in a systematic fashion. A trigger cannot be called or executed; DBMS automatically fires the trigger as a result of a data modification to the associated table. Triggers can be viewed as similar to stored procedures in that both consist of procedural logic that is stored at the database level. Stored procedures, however, are not event-drive and are not attached to a specific table as triggers are Stored procedures are explicitly executed by invoking a CALL to the procedure while triggers are implicitly executed. In addition, triggers can also execute stored procedures. Nested Trigger: A trigger can also contain INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE logic within itself, so when the trigger is fired because of data modification it can also cause another data modification, thereby firing another trigger. A trigger that contains data modification logic within itself is called a nested trigger. Q.What Is View? Ans: A simple view can be thought of as a subset of a table. It can be used for retrieving data, as well as updating or deleting rows. Rows updated or deleted in the view are updated or deleted in the table the view was created with. It should also be noted that as data in the original table changes, so does data in the view, as views are the way to look at part of the original table. The results of using a view are not permanently stored in the database. The data accessed through a view is actually constructed using standard T-SQL select command and can come from one to many different base tables or even other views. Q.What Is Index? Ans: An index is a physical structure containing pointers to the data. Indices are created in an existing table to locate rows more quickly and efficiently. It is possible to create an index on one or more columns of a table, and each index is given a name. The users cannot see the indexes; they are just used to speed up queries. Effective indexes are one of the best ways to improve performance in a database application. A table scan happens when there is no index available to help a query. In a table scan SQL Server examines every row in the table to satisfy the query results. Table scans are sometimes unavoidable, but on large tables, scans have a terrific impact on performance. Q.What Is A Linked Server? Ans: Linked Servers is a concept in SQL Server by which we can add other SQL Server to a Group and query both the SQL Server dbs using T-SQL Statements. With a linked server, you can create very clean, easy to follow, SQL statements that allow remote data to be retrieved, joined and combined with local data. Stored Procedure sp_addlinkedserver, sp_addlinkedsrvlogin will be used add new Linked Server. Q.Which Tcp/ip Port Does Sql Server Run On? How Can It Be Changed? Ans: SQL Server runs on port 1433. It can be changed from the Network Utility TCP/IP properties -> Port number, both on client and the server. Q.What Are The Difference Between Clustered And A Non-clustered Index? Ans: A clustered index is a special type of index that reorders the way records in the table are physically stored. Therefore table can have only one clustered index. The leaf nodes of a clustered index contain the data pages. A non clustered index is a special type of index in which the logical order of the index does not match the physical stored order of the rows on disk. The leaf node of a non clustered index does not consist of the data pages. Instead, the leaf nodes contain index rows. Q.What Are The Different Index Configurations A Table Can Have? Ans: A table can have one of the following index configurations: • No indexes • A clustered index • A clustered index and many nonclustered indexes • A nonclustered index • Many nonclustered indexes Q.What Are Different Types Of Collation Sensitivity? Ans: Case sensitivity – A and a, B and b, etc. Accent sensitivity – a and á, o and ó, etc. Kana Sensitivity – When Japanese kana characters Hiragana and Katakana are treated differently, it is called Kana sensitive. Width sensitivity – A single-byte character (half-width) and the same character represented as a double-byte character (full-width) are treated differently than it is width sensitive. Q.What Is Oltp (online Transaction Processing)? Ans: In OLTP – online transaction processing systems relational database design use the discipline of data modeling and generally follow the Codd rules of data normalization in order to ensure absolute data integrity. Using these rules complex information is broken down into its most simple structures (a table) where all of the individual atomic level elements relate to each other and satisfy the normalization rules. Q.What's The Difference Between A Primary Key And A Unique Key? Ans: Both primary key and unique key enforces uniqueness of the column on which they are defined. But by default primary key creates a clustered index on the column, where are unique creates a nonclustered index by default. Another major difference is that, primary key doesn’t allow NULLs, but unique key allows one NULL only. Q.What Is Difference Between Delete & Truncate Commands? Ans: Delete command removes the rows from a table based on the condition that we provide with a WHERE clause. Truncate will actually remove all the rows from a table and there will be no data in the table after we run the truncate command. TRUNCATE • TRUNCATE is faster and uses fewer system and transaction log resources than DELETE. • TRUNCATE removes the data by deallocating the data pages used to store the table’s data, and only the page deallocations are recorded in the transaction log. • TRUNCATE removes all rows from a table, but the table structure, its columns, constraints, indexes and so on, remains. The counter used by an identity for new rows is reset to the seed for the column. • You cannot use TRUNCATE TABLE on a table referenced by a FOREIGN KEY constraint. Because TRUNCATE TABLE is not logged, it cannot activate a trigger. • TRUNCATE cannot be rolled back. • TRUNCATE is DDL Command. • TRUNCATE Resets identity of the table DELETE • DELETE removes rows one at a time and records an entry in the transaction log for each deleted row. • If you want to retain the identity counter, use DELETE instead. If you want to remove table definition and its data, use the DROP TABLE statement. • DELETE Can be used with or without a WHERE clause • DELETE Activates Triggers. • DELETE can be rolled back. • DELETE is DML Command. • DELETE does not reset the identity of the table. Q.When Is The Use Of Update_statistics Command? Ans: This command is basically used when a large processing of data has occurred. If a large amount of deletions any modification or Bulk Copy into the tables has occurred, it has to update the indexes to take these changes into account. UPDATE_STATISTICS updates the indexes on these tables accordingly. Q.What Is The Difference Between A Having Clause And A Where Clause? Ans: They specify a search condition for a group or an aggregate. But the difference is that HAVING can be used only with the SELECT statement. HAVING is typically used in a GROUP BY clause. When GROUP BY is not used, HAVING behaves like a WHERE clause. Having Clause is basically used only with the GROUP BY function in a query whereas WHERE Clause is applied to each row before they are part of the GROUP BY function in a query. Q.What Are The Properties And Different Types Of Sub-queries? Ans: Properties of Sub-Query • A sub-query must be enclosed in the parenthesis. • A sub-query must be put in the right hand of the comparison operator, and • A sub-query cannot contain an ORDER-BY clause. • A query can contain more than one sub-query. Types of Sub-query • Single-row sub-query, where the sub-query returns only one row. • Multiple-row sub-query, where the sub-query returns multiple rows, and • Multiple column sub-query, where the sub-query returns multiple columns Q.What Is Sql Profiler? Ans: SQL Profiler is a graphical tool that allows system administrators to monitor events in an instance of Microsoft SQL Server. You can capture and save data about each event to a file or SQL Server table to analyze later. For example, you can monitor a production environment to see which stored procedures are hampering performances by executing too slowly. Use SQL Profiler to monitor only the events in which you are interested. If traces are becoming too large, you can filter them based on the information you want, so that only a subset of the event data is collected. Monitoring too many events adds overhead to the server and the monitoring process and can cause the trace file or trace table to grow very large, especially when the monitoring process takes place over a long period of time. Q.What Are The Authentication Modes In Sql Server? How Can It Be Changed? Ans: Windows mode and Mixed Mode – SQL & Windows. To change authentication mode in SQL Server click Start, Programs, Microsoft SQL Server and click SQL Enterprise Manager to run SQL Enterprise Manager from the Microsoft SQL Server program group. Select the server then from the Tools menu select SQL Server Configuration Properties, and choose the Security page. Q.Which Command Using Query Analyzer Will Give You The Version Of Sql Server And Operating System? Ans: SELECT SERVERPROPERTY ('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition'). Q.What Is Sql Server Agent? Ans: SQL Server agent plays an important role in the day-to-day tasks of a database administrator (DBA). It is often overlooked as one of the main tools for SQL Server management. Its purpose is to ease the implementation of tasks for the DBA, with its full-function scheduling engine, which allows you to schedule your own jobs and scripts. Q.Can A Stored Procedure Call Itself Or Recursive Stored Procedure? How Much Level Sp Nesting Is Possible? Ans: Yes. Because Transact-SQL supports recursion, you can write stored procedures that call themselves. Recursion can be defined as a method of problem solving wherein the solution is arrived at by repetitively applying it to subsets of the problem. A common application of recursive logic is to perform numeric computations that lend themselves to repetitive evaluation by the same processing steps. Stored procedures are nested when one stored procedure calls another or executes managed code by referencing a CLR routine, type, or aggregate. You can nest stored procedures and managed code references up to 32 levels. Q.What Is Log Shipping? Ans: Log shipping is the process of automating the backup of database and transaction log files on a production SQL server, and then restoring them onto a standby server. Enterprise Editions only supports log shipping. In log shipping the transactional log file from one server is automatically updated into the backup database on the other server. If one server fails, the other server will have the same db and can be used this as the Disaster Recovery plan. The key feature of log shipping is that it will automatically backup transaction logs throughout the day and automatically restore them on the standby server at defined interval. Q.Name 3 Ways To Get An Accurate Count Of The Number Of Records In A Table? Ans: SELECT * FROM table1 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table1 SELECT rows FROM sysindexes WHERE id = OBJECT_ID(table1) AND indid

SQL Server DBA Interview Questions

Q.What are the different types of backups? Answer: The SQL server offers 4 types of backups to suit the need of the administrator. Complete backup :The complete back up is just zipping the content of the entire database in terms of the different tables and procedures etc. This back up can server as an independent entity that can be restored in different systems with just the base SQL server installed. Transaction log backup: This is the mechanism of backing up the transaction logs that have been maintained in the server. This way the details of the database getting updated is obtained. This cannot be a stand-alone back up mechanism. But can save a lot of time if we already have the file system related to the DB backed up on the new deployment server. Differential backup: This is a subset of the complete backup, where only the modified datasets are backed up. This can save the time when we are just trying to maintain a backup server to main server. File backup: This is the quickest way to take the backup of entire database. Instead of taking in the data actually stored in DB, the files are backed up and the file system thus obtained when combined with the transaction logs of the original system will render the database that we are trying to back up. . Q What are the different levels of isolation? Answer: The isolation represents the way of separating the database from the effects of network accesses, thereby maintaining the consistency. The different levels of isolation are: read committed: This level of isolation uses the shared locks and the reads to the database give the constant and consistent values. read uncommitted: No locks implemented. This is the least effective isolation level. repeatable read: There are lock over the rows and values but the updates are maintained as a separate phantom row which is the next set of values for the specific record. Values can change within a specific transaction of a SQL function. SERIALIZABLE reads: This is the implementation of pure lock mechanism where one specific transaction is not allowed access to specific record before another one completes. Q.What are the steps to take to improve performance of a poor performing query? Answer: Maximum use of indexes, stored procures should be done. Avoid excessive use of complicated joins and cursors. Avoid using conditional operators using columns of different tables. Make use of computed columns and rewriting the query. Q.What is normalization? Explain different levels of normalization? Answer: Check out the article Q100139 from Microsoft knowledge base and of course, there's much more information available in the net. It'll be a good idea to get a hold of any RDBMS fundamentals text book, especially the one by C. J. Date. Most of the times, it will be okay if you can explain till third normal form. Q.What is denormalization and when would you go for it? Answer: As the name indicates, denormalization is the reverse process of normalization. It's the controlled introduction of redundancy in to the database design. It helps improve the query performance as the number of joins could be reduced. Q.How do you implement one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships while designing tables? Answer: One-to-One relationship can be implemented as a single table and rarely as two tables with primary and foreign key relationships. One-to-Many relationships are implemented by splitting the data into two tables with primary key and foreign key relationships. Many-to-Many relationships are implemented using a junction table with the keys from both the tables forming the composite primary key of the junction table. It will be a good idea to read up a database designing fundamentals text book. Q.What's the difference between a primary key and a unique key? Answer: Both primary key and unique enforce uniqueness of the column on which they are defined. But by default primary key creates a clustered index on the column, where are unique creates a nonclustered index by default. Another major difference is that, primary key doesn't allow NULLs, but unique key allows one NULL only. Q.What are user defined datatypes and when you should go for them? Answer: User defined datatypes let you extend the base SQL Server datatypes by providing a descriptive name, and format to the database. Take for example, in your database, there is a column called Flight_Num which appears in many tables. In all these tables it should be varchar(8). In this case you could create a user defined datatype called Flight_num_type of varchar(8) and use it across all your tables. Q.What is bit datatype and what's the information that can be stored inside a bit column? Answer: Bit datatype is used to store boolean information like 1 or 0 (true or false). Untill SQL Server 6.5 bit datatype could hold either a 1 or 0 and there was no support for NULL. But from SQL Server 7.0 onwards, bit datatype can represent a third state, which is NULL. Q.Define candidate key, alternate key, composite key. Answer: A candidate key is one that can identify each row of a table uniquely. Generally a candidate key becomes the primary key of the table. If the table has more than one candidate key, one of them will become the primary key, and the rest are called alternate keys. A key formed by combining at least two or more columns is called composite key. Q.What are defaults? Is there a column to which a default can't be bound? Answer: A default is a value that will be used by a column, if no value is supplied to that column while inserting data. IDENTITY columns and timestamp columns can't have defaults bound to them. Q.What is a transaction and what are ACID properties? Answer: A transaction is a logical unit of work in which, all the steps must be performed or none. ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. These are the properties of a transaction. For more information and explanation of these properties, see SQL Server books online or any RDBMS fundamentals text book. Q.Explain different isolation levels Answer: An isolation level determines the degree of isolation of data between concurrent transactions. The default SQL Server isolation level is Read Committed. Here are the other isolation levels (in the ascending order of isolation): Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Serializable. See SQL Server books online for an explanation of the isolation levels. Be sure to read about SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL, which lets you customize the isolation level at the connection level. Q.What type of Index will get created after executing the above statement? Answer: Non-clustered index. Important thing to note: By default a clustered index gets created on the primary key, unless specified otherwise. Q.What's the maximum size of a row? Answer: 8060 bytes. Don't be surprised with questions like 'what is the maximum number of columns per table'. Check out SQL Server books online for the page titled: "Maximum Capacity Specifications". Q.What is lock escalation? Answer: Lock escalation is the process of converting a lot of low level locks (like row locks, page locks) into higher level locks (like table locks). Every lock is a memory structure too many locks would mean, more memory being occupied by locks. To prevent this from happening, SQL Server escalates the many fine-grain locks to fewer coarse-grain locks. Lock escalation threshold was definable in SQL Server 6.5, but from SQL Server 7.0 onwards it's dynamically managed by SQL Server. Q.What's the difference between DELETE TABLE and TRUNCATE TABLE commands? Answer: DELETE TABLE is a logged operation, so the deletion of each row gets logged in the transaction log, which makes it slow. TRUNCATE TABLE also deletes all the rows in a table, but it won't log the deletion of each row, instead it logs the deallocation of the data pages of the table, which makes it faster. Of course, TRUNCATE TABLE can be rolled back. Q.Explain the storage models of OLAP Answer: Check out MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP in SQL Server books online for more infomation. What are the new features introduced in SQL Server 2000 (or the latest release of SQL Server at the time of your interview)? What changed between the previous version of SQL Server and the current version? Q.What are constraints? Explain different types of constraints. Answer: Constraints enable the RDBMS enforce the integrity of the database automatically, without needing you to create triggers, rule or defaults. Types of constraints: NOT NULL, CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY Q.Whar is an index? What are the types of indexes? How many clustered indexes can be created on a table? I create a separate index on each column of a table. what are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Answer: Indexes are of two types. Clustered indexes and non-clustered indexes. When you craete a clustered index on a table, all the rows in the table are stored in the order of the clustered index key. So, there can be only one clustered index per table. Non-clustered indexes have their own storage separate from the table data storage. Non-clustered indexes are stored as B-tree structures (so do clustered indexes), with the leaf level nodes having the index key and it's row locater. The row located could be the RID or the Clustered index key, depending up on the absence or presence of clustered index on the table. If you create an index on each column of a table, it improves the query performance, as the query optimizer can choose from all the existing indexes to come up with an efficient execution plan. At the same t ime, data modification operations (such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) will become slow, as every time data changes in the table, all the indexes need to be updated. Another disadvantage is that, indexes need disk space, the more indexes you have, more disk space is used. Database administration Q.What is RAID and what are different types of RAID configurations? Answer: RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, used to provide fault tolerance to database servers. There are six RAID levels 0 through 5 offering different levels of performance, fault tolerance. MSDN has some information about RAID levels and for detailed information, check out the RAID advisory board's homepage Q.What are the steps you will take to improve performance of a poor performing query? Answer: This is a very open ended question and there could be a lot of reasons behind the poor performance of a query. But some general issues that you could talk about would be: No indexes, table scans, missing or out of date statistics, blocking, excess recompilations of stored procedures, procedures and triggers without SET NOCOUNT ON, poorly written query with unnecessarily complicated joins, too much normalization, excess usage of cursors and temporary tables. Some of the tools/ways that help you troubleshooting performance problems are: SET SHOWPLAN_ALL ON, SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT ON, SET STATISTICS IO ON, SQL Server Profiler, Windows NT /2000 Performance monitor, Graphical execution plan in Query Analyzer. Q.What are the steps you will take, if you are tasked with securing an SQL Server? Answer: Again this is another open ended question. Here are some things you could talk about: Preferring NT authentication, using server, databse and application roles to control access to the data, securing the physical database files using NTFS permissions, using an unguessable SA password, restricting physical access to the SQL Server, renaming the Administrator account on the SQL Server computer, disabling the Guest account, enabling auditing, using multiprotocol encryption, setting up SSL, setting up firewalls, isolating SQL Server from the web server etc. Q.What is a deadlock and what is a live lock? How will you go about resolving deadlocks? Answer: Deadlock is a situation when two processes, each having a lock on one piece of data, attempt to acquire a lock on the other's piece. Each process would wait indefinitely for the other to release the lock, unless one of the user processes is terminated. SQL Server detects deadlocks and terminates one user's process. A livelock is one, where a request for an exclusive lock is repeatedly denied because a series of overlapping shared locks keeps interfering. SQL Server detects the situation after four denials and refuses further shared locks. A livelock also occurs when read transactions monopolize a table or page, forcing a write transaction to wait indefinitely. Check out SET DEADLOCK_PRIORITY and "Minimizing Deadlocks" in SQL Server books online. Also check out the article Q169960 from Microsoft knowledge base. Q.What is blocking and how would you troubleshoot it? Answer: Blocking happens when one connection from an application holds a lock and a second connection requires a conflicting lock type. This forces the second connection to wait, blocked on the first. Q.Explain CREATE DATABASE syntax Answer: Many of us are used to craeting databases from the Enterprise Manager or by just issuing the command: CREATE DATABAE MyDB. But what if you have to create a database with two filegroups, one on drive C and the other on drive D with log on drive E with an initial size of 600 MB and with a growth factor of 15%? That's why being a DBA you should be familiar with the CREATE DATABASE syntax. Check out SQL Server books online for more information. Q.How to restart SQL Server in single user mode? How to start SQL Server in minimal configuration mode? Answer: SQL Server can be started from command line, using the SQLSERVR.EXE. This EXE has some very important parameters with which a DBA should be familiar with. -m is used for starting SQL Server in single user mode and -f is used to start the SQL Server in minimal confuguration mode. Check out SQL Server books online for more parameters and their explanations. Q.As a part of your job, what are the DBCC commands that you commonly use for database maintenance? Answer: DBCC CHECKDB, DBCC CHECKTABLE, DBCC CHECKCATALOG, DBCC CHECKALLOC, DBCC SHOWCONTIG, DBCC SHRINKDATABASE, DBCC SHRINKFILE etc . Q.What are statistics, under what circumstances they go out of date, how do you update them? Answer: Statistics determine the selectivity of the indexes. If an indexed column has unique values then the selectivity of that index is more, as opposed to an index with non-unique values. Query optimizer uses these indexes in determining whether to choose an index or not while executing a query. Some situations under which you should update statistics: 1) If there is significant change in the key values in the index 2) If a large amount of data in an indexed column has been added, changed, or removed (that is, if the distribution of key values has changed), or the table has been truncated using the TRUNCATE TABLE statement and then repopulated 3) Database is upgraded from a previous version Q.What are the different ways of moving data/databases between servers and databases in SQL Server? Answer: There are lots of options available, you have to choose your option depending upon your requirements. Some of the options you have are: BACKUP/RESTORE, dettaching and attaching databases, replication, DTS, BCP, logshipping, INSERT...SELECT, SELECT...INTO, creating INSERT scripts to generate data. Q.What is database replicaion? What are the different types of replication you can set up in SQL Server? Answer: Replication is the process of copying/moving data between databases on the same or different servers. SQL Server supports the following types of replication scenarios: Snapshot replication Transactional replication (with immediate updating subscribers, with queued updating subscribers) Merge replication See SQL Server books online for indepth coverage on replication. Be prepared to explain how different replication agents function, what are the main system tables used in replication etc. How to determine the service pack currently installed on SQL Server? The global variable @@Version stores the build number of the sqlservr.exe, which is used to determine the service pack installed. To know more about this process visit SQL Server service packs and versions. Database programming (top) Q.What are cursors? Explain different types of cursors. What are the disadvantages of cursors? How can you avoid cursors? Answer: Cursors allow row-by-row prcessing of the resultsets. Types of cursors: Static, Dynamic, Forward-only, Keyset-driven. See books online for more information. Disadvantages of cursors: Each time you fetch a row from the cursor, it results in a network roundtrip, where as a normal SELECT query makes only one rowundtrip, however large the resultset is. Cursors are also costly because they require more resources and temporary storage (results in more IO operations). Furthere, there are restrictions on the SELECT statements that can be used with some types of cursors. Most of the times, set based operations can be used instead of cursors. Here is an example: If you have to give a flat hike to your employees using the following criteria: Salary between 30000 and 40000 -- 5000 hike Salary between 40000 and 55000 -- 7000 hike Salary between 55000 and 65000 -- 9000 hike In this situation many developers tend to use a cursor, determine each employee's salary and update his salary according to the above formula. But the same can be achieved by multiple update statements or can be combined in a single UPDATE statement as shown below: UPDATE tbl_emp SET salary = CASE WHEN salary BETWEEN 30000 AND 40000 THEN salary + 5000 WHEN salary BETWEEN 40000 AND 55000 THEN salary + 7000 WHEN salary BETWEEN 55000 AND 65000 THEN salary + 10000 END Sql Server DBA Interview Questions Sql Server DBA Interview Questions and Answers Q.Write down the general syntax for a SELECT statements covering all the options. Answer: Here's the basic syntax: (Also checkout SELECT in books online for advanced syntax). SELECT select_list FROM table_source ] Q.What is a join and explain different types of joins. Answer: Joins are used in queries to explain how different tables are related. Joins also let you select data from a table depending upon data from another table. Types of joins: INNER JOINs, OUTER JOINs, CROSS JOINs. OUTER JOINs are further classified as LEFT OUTER JOINS, RIGHT OUTER JOINS and FULL OUTER JOINS. Q.What is the system function to get the current user's user id? Answer: USER_ID(). Also check out other system functions like USER_NAME(), SYSTEM_USER, SESSION_USER, CURRENT_USER, USER, SUSER_SID(), HOST_NAME(). Q. What are triggers? How many triggers you can have on a table? How to invoke a trigger on demand? Answer: Triggers are special kind of stored procedures that get executed automatically when an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operation takes place on a table. In SQL Server 6.5 you could define only 3 triggers per table, one for INSERT, one for UPDATE and one for DELETE. From SQL Server 7.0 onwards, this restriction is gone, and you could create multiple triggers per each action. But in 7.0 there's no way to control the order in which the triggers fire. In SQL Server 2000 you could specify which trigger fires first or fires last using sp_settriggerorder Triggers can't be invoked on demand. They get triggered only when an associated action (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) happens on the table on which they are defined. Triggers are generally used to implement business rules, auditing. Triggers can also be used to extend the referential integrity checks, but wherever possible, use constraints for this purpose, instead of triggers, as constraints are much faster. Till SQL Server 7.0, triggers fire only after the data modification operation happens. So in a way, they are called post triggers. But in SQL Server 2000 you could create pre triggers also. Search SQL Server 2000 books online for INSTEAD OF triggers. Also check out books online for 'inserted table', 'deleted table' and COLUMNS_UPDATED() There is a trigger defined for INSERT operations on a table, in an OLTP system. The trigger is written to instantiate a COM object and pass the newly insterted rows to it for some custom processing. What do you think of this implementation? Can this be implemented better? Instantiating COM objects is a time consuming process and since you are doing it from within a trigger, it slows down the data insertion process. Same is the case with sending emails from triggers. This scenario can be better implemented by logging all the necessary data into a separate table, and have a job which periodically checks this table and does the needful. Q.What is a self join? Explain it with an example. Answer: Self join is just like any other join, except that two instances of the same table will be joined in the query. Here is an example: Employees table which contains rows for normal employees as well as managers. So, to find out the managers of all the employees, you need a self join. CREATE TABLE emp ( empid int, mgrid int, empname char(10) ) INSERT emp SELECT 1,2,'Vyas' INSERT emp SELECT 2,3,'Mohan' INSERT emp SELECT 3,NULL,'Shobha' INSERT emp SELECT 4,2,'Shridhar' INSERT emp SELECT 5,2,'Sourabh' SELECT t1.empname , t2.empname FROM emp t1, emp t2 WHERE t1.mgrid = t2.empid Here's an advanced query using a LEFT OUTER JOIN that even returns the employees without managers (super bosses) SELECT t1.empname , COALESCE(t2.empname, 'No manager') FROM emp t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN emp t2 ON t1.mgrid = t2.empid Q.What is a deadlock and what is a live lock? How will you go about resolving deadlocks? Answer: A deadlock occurs when two or more processes waits for a resource that is acquired by or is under the control of another process. A live lock is similar to a deadlock except the process states keeps changing. The result of such state is that none of the process will be complete. Deadlock detection finds and resolves deadlocks. A WFG strategy is followed. WFG is wait for graph. In WFG, processes are represented by nodes while dependencies are represented by edges. Thus, if process A is waiting for a resource held by process B, there is an edge in the WFG from the node for process A to the node for process B. a cycle is this graph is a deadlock. WFG constantly checks for cycles or when a process is blocked and adds a new edge to the WFG. When a cycle is found, a victim is selected and aborted. Q.What is blocking and how would you troubleshoot it? Answer: Blocking occurs when two or more rows are locked by one SQL connection and a second connection to the SQL server requires a conflicting on lock on those rows. This results in the second connection to wait until the first lock is released. Troubleshooting blocking: SQL scripts can be written that constantly monitor the state of locking and blocking on SQL Server The common blocking scenarios must be identified and resolved. The scripts output must be checked constantly, The SQL profilers data must be examined regularly to detect blocking. Q.Explain the different types of BACKUPs available in SQL Server. Answer: Complete database backup: This type of backup will backup all the information in the database. Used most commonly for disaster recovery and takes the longest time to backup. Differential databse backup: The database is divided into partitions that have been modified since last complete backup. Most suitable for large databases. The most recent differential backup contains the changes from previous backups. Transaction log backups: Backups only the changes logged in the transaction log. The transaction log has all changes logged about a database. Once the changes are accommodated on the database, the log is truncated or backed up. File/File Group backups: used to recover individual files or file groups. Each filegroup can be individually backed up. This helps in recovery only the required file or filegroup for disaster recovery. Q.What is database isolation in SQL Server? Answer: Isolation in database defines how and when changes made by one transaction can be visible to other transactions. Different isolation levels are: Serializable Repeatable read Read committed Read uncommitted Q.What is a Schema in SQL Server ? Explain how to create a new Schema in a Database? Answer: A schema is used to create database objects. It can be created using CREATE SCHEMA statement. The objects created can be moved between schemas. Multiple database users can share a single default schema. CREATE SCHEMA sample; Table creation Create table sample.sampleinfo { id int primary key, name varchar(20) } Q.Explain how to create a Scrollable Cursor with the SCROLL Option. Answer: Using the SCROLL keyword while declaring a cursor allows fetching of rows in any sequence Example: DECLARE employee_curs SCROLL CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM employee; The active set of the cursor is stored can be accessed in any order without the need of opening and closing the cursor. The Scroll cursors can be set for select and function cursors but not insert or update statements. Q.Explain how to create a Dynamic Cursor with the DYNAMIC Option. Answer: When a cursor is declared as DYNAMIC, the cursor reflects all changes made to the base tables as the cursor is scrolled around. Declare cursor_name cursor FOR select_statement The dynamic option does not support ABSOLUTE FETCH. Q.What are database files and filegroups? Answer: Database files are used for mapping the database over some operating system files. Data and log information are separate. SQL server database has three types of database files: Primary: starting point of a database. It also points to other files in database. Extension: .mdf Secondary: All data files except primary data file is a part of secondary files. Extension: .ndf Log files: All log information used to recover database. Extension: .ldf Q.Describe in brief Databases and SQL Server Databases Architecture. Answer: SQL Server consists of a set of various components which fulfill data storage and data analysis needs for enterprise applications. Database architecture: All the data is stored in databases which is organized into logical components visible to the end users. It’s only the administrator who needs to actually deal with the physical storage aspect of the databases, whereas users only deal with database tables. Every SQL Server instance has primarily 4 system database i.e. master, model, tempdb and msdb. All other databases are user created databases as per their needs and requirements. A single SQL Server instance is capable of handling thousands of users working on multiple databases. Q.How can you start the SQL Server in the single user mode and the minimal configuration mode? Answer: The SQLServer.exe is the executable which can be called in the command prompt with the parameters -m and -f. These are the options that will start the SQL server in the user mode and minimal configuration mode respectively. Q.How can you know that statistics should be updated? Answer: Statistics represent the uniqueness for the indexes that are being used for selecting the records. This can make the query execution pretty efficient. The tables that we are dealing with if truncated and repopulated, there is a good chance that the indexes and statistics are out of sync and this is when we have to update the statistics. There are also other situations like when the table has been modified and lot of rows have been added recently or like when a server has been updated with different version of software. These also give us the reason to use the UPDATE_STATISTICS, DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS etc to update it accordingly. Q.What is replication in SQL Server? Answer: Replication refers to the moving or copying of the database elements from one system to another. This can be done in the SQL Server in one of the following methods: Transactional. Snapshop. Merge replication. Q.Can we initiate a external COM object from within SQL? Answer: Yes we can use the stored procedure sp_OACreate to initiate the external COM object from the T-SQL. Q.What is a schema? How is it useful in SQL Serers? Answer: The Schema refers to the overall structure of the database with all related information like users, access privileges, interaction information between the different tables etc. The CREATE SCHEMA is the command that can be used to create the schema in the SQL Server. This when done can be used to re deploy the same database in another system for demonstrative or test purposes. This holds intact the underlying framework over which the database has been built. Q.What is a write-ahead log? Answer: The write-ahead log is the logging system that just updates the buffer cache of the database for the transactions and updates the logs and only then the actual changes are incorporated in the actual database. This is the reason why it is called “write ahead”. This helps in maintaining the consistency in the database. This can also be useful in getting the actual database values even in case of failures. Q.What is the use of check points in the transaction logs? Answer: The check points are restoration points that indicate the specific state of the database. When there is some failure int he database that is occurring before the next check point, the database can be reverted back to the previous check point and thus the database would still be consistent. Q.What is a column with identity? Answer: The column with a defined identity in turn means that there is an unique value that the system assigns to the specific column. This is similar to the AUTONumber property of the Access backend. Q.What are the different components that constitute the SQL Server architecture? Answer: The Logical component consists of the overall database structure definitions, users, groups, access permissions, collations etc. The Physical component is the one that contains the physically represented form of the database i.e the actual files. There are three types of files: Primary data files: These contain the links to the other files. This file is the representation of the higher level of the database. (.mdf) Secondary data files: These contain the files that contain the values and actual data as in database. Log files: These represent the different types of the logging output of the SQL Server, including the transaction logs. Q.What are scrollable cursors? How are they created? Answer: The scrollable cursors are the ones that can get the entire set of rows as single entity, within which all the rows present can be accessed in any order without the open/close of cursor done for every row access. The scrollable cursors are created with the keyword SCROLL added to the CREATE Cursor statements. The scrollable cursors are useful for the access of information from different rows but not for the delete/insert of new rows. Q.What is RAID? How does it help storage of databases? Answer: The RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. With its own RAID controllers, the RAID implements a fail-safe storage mechanism with its own backup mechanisms. There are different configurations of the RAID that all give us the ACID properties of storage along with other such facilities. This kind of storage will make the SQL Server database to be fail-safe and stable. This can sometimes mean that the backup mechanisms and other such reliability measures can be taken off from the SQL Server level of operations. Q.How can you identify the version number of the SQL Server installed? The global variable @@version has the build and version information for the SQL Server and the service packs. Q. What are the different types of Indexes available in SQL Server? Answer: The simplest answer to this is “Clustered and Non-Clustered Indexes”. There are other types of Indexes what can be mentioned such as Unique, XML, Spatial and Filtered Indexes. More on these Indexes later. Q. What is the difference between Clustered and Non-Clustered Index? In a clustered index, the leaf level pages are the actual data pages of the table. When a clustered index is created on a table, the data pages are arranged accordingly based on the clustered index key. There can only be one Clustered index on a table. In a Non-Clustered index, the leaf level pages does not contain data pages instread it contains pointers to the data pages. There can multiple non-clustered indexes on a single table. Q.How do you troubleshoot errors in a SQL Server Agent Job? Answer: Inside SSMS, in Object explorer under SQL Server Agent look for Job Activity Monitor. The job activity monitor displays the current status of all the jobs on the instance. Choose the particular job which failed, right click and choose view history from the drop down menu. The execution history of the job is displayed and you may choose the execution time (if the job failed multiple times during the same day). There would information such as the time it took to execute that Job and details about the error occurred. Q.What is the default Port No on which SQL Server listens? Answer: 1433 Q. How many files can a Database contain in SQL Server?How many types of data files exists in SQL Server? How many of those files can exist for a single database? Answer: A Database can contain a maximum of 32,767 files. There are Primarily 2 types of data files Primary data file and Secondary data file(s). There can be only one Primary data file and multiple secondary data files as long as the total # of files is less than 32,767 files. Q. What is DCL? Answer: DCL stands for Data Control Language. Q.What are the commands used in DCL? Answer: GRANT, DENY and REVOKE. Q.What is Fill Factor? Answer: Fill Factor is a setting that is applicable to Indexes in SQL Server. The fill factor value determines how much data is written to an index page when it is created / rebuilt. Q.What is the default fill factor value? Answer: By default the fill factor value is set to 0. Q.Where do you find the default Index fill factor and how to change it? Answer: The easiest way to find and change the default fill factor value is from Management Studio, Right click the Server and choose properties. In the Server Properties, choose Database Settings. you should see the default fill factor value in the top section. You can change to a desired value there. The other of viewing and changing this value is using sp_configure. Q.What is SQL Profiler. What are the default templates with it? Answer: SQL Server Profiler is a graphical user interface to SQL Trace for monitoring an instance of the Database Engine or Analysis Services. You can capture and save data about each event to a file or table to analyze later. Q.What are the DMVs? Answer: Dynamic Management Views (DMV) return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance. Q.What is the syntax to execute the sys.dm_db_missing_index_details? Answer: Select * from sys.dm_db_missing_index_details contact for more on SQL Server DBA Online Training

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