Ok, I just got out of another interview earlier today and there are a couple good ones in here.  It’s not anywhere near as good as the last one, but you’ve gotta admit that’s a tough act to follow.  So this girl was much more business-like and she was quite nice and honestly just trying to do her best.  She was quite shy and Asian so her english wasn’t the best.  So I’m forced to interpret her answers as best I can sometimes.  So I honestly can’t tell you exactly what she said for all of them, but I’m getting the gist as best I can from the different things she want through to try to reason it out.  I typically just landed on the last thing she said and took that as her answer.

Q:  What the difference between an SP and a trigger?

A:  A trigger is a special SP that stops when you run it after a certain time.  They can only run for a pre-determined time.

Me:  Oh yeah?  Ok, so how long can they run?

Her:  It depends on how big the server is.  It’s determined by the resources.

Q:  what’s the difference between datetime and smalldatetime?

A:  Smalldatetime is limited and datetime is much more range of time.

Q:  What does sp_ in front of an SP signify? 

A:  It just means that it’s an SP.  All SPs have to be named sp_ or the system won’t read them as SPs.

Q:  What are the 2 types of UDFs?

A:  Fixed and variable.

Me:  Ummm, ok.

Q:  What’s the difference between ‘Select Into’ and ‘Insert Into”?

A:  Insert puts data into a table… select into… (she struggles with the answer and half says a couple things.  She then fades out after saying about 3 things I couldn’t understand.  None of them sounded like an answer though.)

Q:  What’s the difference between varchar and nvarchar?

A:  International support.

Q:  What’s the difference between a clustered index and a non-clustered index?

A:  Cluster is a pair index.  It’s at the server level so when something is down it’s kind of like a backup.  Non-clustered  in the only one…(something I can’t understand)… you can rely on that one and only backups can support it.

 

I then told her to give me a question to ask her.  “I want you to pick the next one.  Give me a specific question to ask you.”

And after thinking for a minute or so she comes up with this:

“What does DML stand for?”

So I asked her that question, and after fudging around for over a minute she finally came up with the right answer.  She went through many variations before landing on the right answer though.

Ok guys, that’s it for this round.