DBMS Question Bank

UNIT I

PART A

1. What are database systems? List out its characteristics.
2. What are logical levels is used in data abstraction?
3. Define data, database, DBMS and data base system.
4. Define DBMS.
5. What is meant by data abstraction?
6. Distinguish between physical and logical data independence.
7. What do you understand by data independence? How can it be achieved?
8. What are the data models present in DBMS?
9. What is a data dictionary? What are the information’s stored in the data dictionary?
10. What are the benefits of data dictionary? Who are the users of data dictionary?
11. What is meant by an Instance of the database and schema?
12. Explain briefly about E-R data model.
13. What is the purpose of Meta data?
14. Define the terms: (a) meta data (b)Canned transaction
15. What are the problems in data redundancy?
16. What is the purpose of buffer manager?
17. Define the term Atomicity in transaction management.
18. What are the characteristics that distinguish a DBMS from traditional file processing system?
19. What is the purpose of transaction manager?
20. List out the functions of DBA.
21. Who are all the database users present in DBMS?
22. Describe the different types of database end users.
23. What are entities?
24. What are weak and strong entities? How are they represented in E-R diagram?
25. What is a simple attribute? Give examples.
26. What is a composite attribute? Give examples.
27. What is a single valued attribute? Give examples.
28. What is a multi valued attribute? Give examples.
29. What are key and non key attributes?
30. What is the relationship between entities and attributes?
31. What is E-R modeling?
32. What is E-R diagram and what are their objectives?
33. What is a candidate key? Give an example.
34. What is a primary key? Give an example.
35. What is an alternate key? Give an example.
36. What do you mean by foreign key?
37. What are domain constraints?
38. What is entity integrity?
39. What is a referential integrity?
40. What is meant by a unary and binary operation? What are they?
41. How ‘Natural –Join’ operation is performed?
42. What is a join? What are the benefits of joins?
43. What is equijoin and non equijoin?
44. List the operations of Relational algebra.
45. Define Relational algebra.
46. Differentiate between Cartesian product and natural join operations used in relational algebra.
47. Define database schema.
48. What are the different database languages?
49. How does the domain relational calculus differ from tuple relational calculus?
50. In what sense does relational calculus differ from relational algebra and in what sense are they similar?
51. What is relational calculus?
52. Define Network data base model.
53. What are the two different categories of query languages?


PART B
1. Explain about the relational algebra?
2. Explain in detail about relational data model.
3. Explain about instances & schema, data independence & DBA?
5. Explain about data models?
6. Explain in detail about ER model.
7. Explain about storage management & transaction management components of a
database system.
8. Explain about the architecture of database system.
9. Explain the various basic relational algebra operations in detail.
10. Write a note on relational calculus.
11. Draw the ER diagram for hospital management system.
12. Explain the 3 schema architecture of DBS.Why do we need mappings between
different schema levels? How do different schema definition languages support
this architecture?
13. Consider the following tables:
Employee (Emp_no, Name, Emp_city)
Company (Emp_no, Company_name, Salary)
i. Write a SQL query to display Employee name and company name.
ii. Write a SQL query to display employee name, employee city ,company name and salary of all the employees whose salary >10000
iii. Write a query to display all the employees working in ‘XYZ’ company.
14. Explain various DML commands with neat syntax.
15. Explain in detail any two data models with sample databases.
16. Write short notes on i. Network model ii. Hierarchical model


UNIT II
PART A
1. What do you meant by database integrity?
2. What is referential integrity?
3. What is a view and how is it created? Explain with an example.
4. What is a view in SQL? How is it defined?
5. What is meant by normalization?
6. What is lossy decomposition?
7. What is a trivial functional dependency? Give an example.
8. Why is a relation with many NULLs considered to be bad?
9. What is meant by lossless join decomposition?
10. What is a multi value dependency?
11. What is transitive dependency?
12. What are Armstrong’s axioms?
13. Compare BCNF and 3NF.
14. What are the inference rules for functional dependencies?
15. Define 3NF.
16. Explain the domain key normal form(DKNF).
17. Explain the 4NF and 5NF.
18. What is embedded SQL? What are the advantages of embedded SQL programs?
19. Distinguish between static and dynamic SQL.
20. What is meant by static SQL? How it differs from dynamic SQL?
21. What are triggers? What are three major classes of triggers?
22. What are statement level and row level triggers?
23. What are the advantages and limitation of triggers?
24. What is SQL? What are the characteristics of SQL?
25. What are DDL commands? Give examples.
26. What are DML commands? Give examples.
27. What are DCL commands? Give examples.
28. What are the set operations in SQL? Give examples.
29. How are the nulls represented in database system?
30. What are the situations where you can use nulls?
31. What are views? How they are created?
32. What is the purpose of group by clause in the SELECT statement?
33. What are aggregate functions?


PART B
1. Explain 2NF and 3NF in detail
2. Define BCNF .How does it differ from 3NF.
3. Explain the codd’s rules for relational database design.
4. Explain the ACID properties of a transaction

UNIT III

PART A

1. What are the operations on files?
2. What are the various modes in which a data item may be locked? Explain.
3.
4. What is hasing? Explain.
5. What is meant by indexing?
6. What is a hash function? Give an example.
7. What is a B tree index?
8. What is a B+ tree index?
9. What is a dense index? Give an example.
10. What is a sparse index? Give an example.
11. What is query processing? What is query transformation?
12. What are the different query optimization techniques?
13. Define i. merge join ii. Hash join.
14. What is transaction management?
15. What is concurrency control?
16. What are the ACID properties of a transaction?
17. What do you mean by isolation? Why is it important? Give an example.
18. What do you mean by consistency? Why is it important? Give an example.
19. What do you mean by atomicity? Why is it important? Give an example.
20. What do you mean by durability? Why is it important? Give an example.
21. List out the states of a transaction.

PART B
1. With a neat diagram explain the steps involved in query process.
2. Explain in detail about B+ tree index files.
3. What is deadlock? Explain the various approaches used to recover from deadlock.




UNIT IV

1. What are different types of locks? Distinguish between them.
2. What is database recovery? Why backups are important?
3. What is hashing? Explain.
1. What is serializability? What are the objectives of serializability?
2. What is conflict serializability?
3. What is view serializability?
4. What are cascade less schedules? Give an example.
5. What are different types of locks? Distinguish between them.
6. What is two phase locking?
7. Distinguish between shared and exclusive locks.
8. Distinguish between rigorous locking and strict two phase locking.
9. What is recoverability? What are recoverable schedules?
10. What are the concurrency control schemes?
11. What is check pointing?
12. What are transaction logs?
13. What is the difference between volatile and non volatile storage?
14. What do you mean by rollback?
15. What is forced writing?
16. What is meant by pinned block?
17. What are redo and undo logs?
18. What is a timestamp? State its advantages.
19. What is shadow paging? State its advantages.
20. What is a distributed database? List out its objectives.
21. Define i. replication ii.fragmentation.
22. Distinguish between horizontal and vertical fragmentation. Give examples.
23. What are object oriented databases? List out its characteristics.
24. What is deadlock? What are the techniques used to avoid deadlock?
25. What are the methods used to prevent the system from dead lock?
26. What is database recovery? Why backups are important?

PART B

1. What is a log? What are the different types of log records? With an example
explain the various log based recovery schemes.
2. Explain shadow paging recovery scheme in detail.



UNIT V
PART A
1. What is a distributed database? List out its objectives.
2. What are centralized databases? List out its characteristics.
3. Distinguish between centralized and distributed databases.
4. What is XML? List out its properties.
5. What is DTD? Give an example.
6. Define i. XSLT ii.Xpath
7. What is meant by data replication? State its advantages.
8. Distinguish between homogenous and heterogeneous distributed databases.
9. Define the terms object, attribute and class.

PART B

1. Draw a neat sketch to indicate the architecture of a distributed database system. With
an example explain the various form of data fragmentation used in DDB.
2. Explain XML querying and Transformation
3. Discuss the relative advantages of centralized and distributed database
4. Write the DTD for the banking database.
5. Explain i) Object Oriented relational database.
ii) XML schema
6. Explain the architecture of data warehousing with a neat diagram.
7. What are the various issues to be considered while building a warehouse?
Explain.